Overlord Trailer Reveals World War II Zombie Horror Flick
Nazis and soldiers and zombies and an AC/DC track, oh my.
Paramount Pictures and Bad Robot Productions unveiled the first trailer for Overlord, the World War II-set "bat s*** crazy" film from director Julis Avery (Son of a Gun), writers Billy Ray (Captain Phillips) and Mark L. Smith (The Revenant), and producer J.J. Abrams.
Things start off on a moody foot, the camera showing a sky full of war planes as Jovan Adepo's character says in voiceover, "Three months ago, I was cutting grass in my front yard. The mailman shows up with a letter from the army, and now I'm here, no idea where I'm going to end up."
From there on out, the Overlord trailer takes off at full throttle and throws viewers into the film's intense story. A plane carrying Allied paratrooper soldiers is shot out of the sky, and when the men land in a village in Nazi-occupied France, they discover unimaginable horrors taking place in a mysterious compound behind enemy lines: the Nazis have been summoning supernatural forces to conduct human experiments as a way to gain an advantage in the war.
Such tests yield expectedly terrifying results. There's a man hanging in bag, waiting to be "born"; one pulling a Gus Fring and smiling with half his face torn off; and what looks to be a man's severed head flicking his eyes open and staring directly into the soul of someone off screen. As Pilou Asbæk's character explains in the trailer, "A thousand-year army needs thousand-year soldiers."
Abrams has made it clearer than your complexion after you ditch alcohol and adopt a regimented skincare routine that Overlord is in no way a Cloverfield sequel or a "secret Cloverfield movie" — but this footage carries with it a bit of that "mystery box" feel signature to the Cloverfield franchise.
What sets Overlord apart, however, is the fact that it mostly feels like a zombie horror pic that probably won't include an off-the-walls twist as seen in 10 Cloverfield Lane (which worked in its favor) or The Cloverfield Paradox (which made the pic even less enjoyable). In place of a bolt from the blue, there are soldiers shooting at the undead, a woman attempting to kill them using a flamethrower, and AC/DC's "Hells Bells." Sign us the heck up.
Overlord is reportedly set on June 5, 1944 — the evening before D-Day. The film stars plenty of familiar faces: Wyatt Russell (Lodge 49, Everybody Wants Some!!), John Magaro (Amazon's Jack Ryan), Iain De Caestecker (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.), Mathilde Ollivier (The Misfortunes of Francois Jane), Jacob Anderson (Game of Thrones), and Bokeem Woodbine (Fargo).
Overlord is scheduled for release on November 9.