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THE WRETCHED (2020) – Official Movie Trailer

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A teenager stuck at his dad’s lake house for the summer starts to suspect the woman next door isn’t wearing her own skin anymore.

The official trailer for The Wretched arrived in March 2020 courtesy of Rialto Distribution and IFC Midnight, giving audiences their clearest look yet at the supernatural horror film from brothers Brett Pierce and Drew T. Pierce. Shot on location in Michigan’s Leelanau County, the film trades big-city scares for a quiet lake town where something ancient has moved in next door. It’s set for a North American release on May 1, 2020, in limited theaters and on digital platforms.

• The film follows Ben Shaw (John-Paul Howard), a rebellious teen sent to live with his father Liam (Jamison Jones) during his parents’ divorce, who suspects the neighbor Abbie (Zarah Mahler) has been possessed by a thousand-year-old witch that preys on children.
• Directors Brett and Drew Pierce are the sons of Bart Pierce, a special effects artist who worked on Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead, and the brothers built the story as a modern take on dark fairy tales and witch mythology.
• Before its wide release, The Wretched premiered at the Fantasia International Film Festival in July 2019 and later screened at the Traverse City Film Festival.

A Small Town With a Big Secret

The trailer plants Ben at the local marina, where he’s put to work for the summer and strikes up a friendship with a local girl named Mallory (Piper Curda). It’s meant to be a normal, if awkward, summer of parental fallout and odd jobs. Instead, Ben starts noticing things in the woods next to his father’s house that don’t add up, and the trailer leans hard into that slow-building dread rather than jump-scare theatrics.

Production leaned on real northern Michigan locations, including Omena and the Sunset Lodge, giving the film a lived-in, sun-drenched look that the directors use as a contrast against what’s crawling in under it. The Pierce brothers have talked about wanting the setting itself to feel like a character, the kind of place where everyone knows everyone, which makes it worse when someone starts acting like they don’t remember their own family.

The Witch Next Door

At the center of the plot is Abbie, the Shaws’ next-door neighbor, who Ben becomes convinced isn’t herself anymore. According to the film’s premise, the witch inside her doesn’t just kill — it erases. Children vanish, and their own families forget they ever existed, leaving Ben as the only person who notices anything is wrong at all.

He’s the only one who remembers the kids that everyone else has already forgotten.

That premise gives the trailer its unsettling hook — it’s not a monster hiding in the dark, it’s a monster hiding in plain sight, wearing a neighbor’s face at backyard barbecues. Fans of practical, folklore-rooted horror will recognize the DNA the Pierce brothers are working from, the same tradition that produced films like The Evil Dead, filtered through a coming-of-age lens.

From Festival Circuit to Wide Release

Before landing a theatrical date, The Wretched did its rounds on the festival circuit, debuting at Fantasia in July 2019 and later playing the Traverse City Film Festival — a fitting stop given the film’s Michigan roots. The film is produced by Cailleach Productions along with Ed Polgardy and Chang Tseng, and its path to a May 1 release through IFC Midnight follows the same route a lot of genre films use to build word of mouth before a wider audience gets a shot at it.

Readers who enjoy tracking what’s next on the horror calendar can check out The Best Upcoming HORROR Movies 2020 & 2021 (Trailers) for more titles lining up behind it, while fans mapping out the rest of the year’s slate might also want to see The Only Big Movies Left That Still May Come Out In 2020.

For now, all eyes are on May 1 — the date IFC Midnight has set to bring Ben Shaw’s summer nightmare out of the festival circuit and into theaters and homes across the country.

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