RISE OF THE RATS Brings Punk-Rock Horror and Buried Trauma to Ditchfield
Black Mandala has unveiled RISE OF THE RATS, a new British horror-punk feature from director Stephen Roach, and this one looks like it crawled straight out of an ’80s video store with a safety pin through its ear.
Drawing inspiration from genre staples like The Lost Boys, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Gremlins, the film mixes creature horror, dark comedy, punk attitude, and some seriously ugly family history. Roach describes the project as a horror film built around genuine punk energy, with rebellion and personality running through everything from the performances to the visual style.
At the center of the story is Kayla Thornhill, a rebellious young punk who travels with her estranged father, Jack, to Ditchfield, the town where he grew up. The trip already carries plenty of emotional baggage, then things get considerably worse when Kayla discovers the town has been overrun by rats.
And these are only the beginning.
As Kayla digs into Ditchfield’s history, she uncovers rumors surrounding a brutal act of collective violence committed decades earlier. The townspeople buried the truth, yet buried things have a nasty habit of clawing their way back into daylight in horror movies.
Enter the Rat Man.
The grotesque figure emerges as a physical manifestation of the town’s guilt, violence, abandonment, and unresolved trauma, unleashing hordes of bloodthirsty rats while settling an old score. Kayla soon finds herself facing more than the horrors beneath Ditchfield. She also has to confront her father’s connection to the secret that started everything.
That combination gives RISE OF THE RATS a little more meat on the bone than a straightforward creature feature. Killer rats and punk aesthetics already make a good sales pitch, though the idea of a town literally being consumed by the consequences of what it tried to bury gives the whole thing an appropriately grim backbone.
The film stars Grace Gallagher, Mark Collier, Tania Staite, Jamie Nowski, Shayli Reagan, Darren Le Fevre, and Adrian Annis.
Stephen Roach directs and serves as cinematographer from a script by Robert Howgate, who also produces. Music comes from Karl Casey and Daniel Garavini.
RISE OF THE RATS is represented internationally by Black Mandala.
We’ll be keeping an eye on this one as more release details crawl out of the walls.
