The Messengers
Short description
The Solomon family leaves Chicago for an isolated sunflower farm in North Dakota, hoping for a fresh start. Their attempt at a quiet rural life soon turns unsettling: sixteen-year-old Jess and her younger brother Ben begin seeing frightening apparitions that no one else can perceive. As the phenomena grow more aggressive, Jess tries to warn her parents, but they doubt her account, leaving her to face the threat largely on her own.
The Messengers is a 2007 American horror, mystery and thriller film directed by Danny Pang and Oxide Pang Chun, the Hong Kong filmmaking brothers. It came after their earlier work on The Eye and The Eye 2, and it was written by Mark Wheaton and produced by Sam Raimi, Jim Miller and Robert Tapert. Kristen Stewart plays Jess, with Dylan McDermott and Penelope Ann Miller as her parents, and John Corbett, Dustin Milligan and William B. Davis in supporting roles.
Made for about 16 million dollars, the film took roughly 55 million dollars worldwide, a strong return on its budget. Audiences were lukewarm: it holds a rating of 5.3 out of 10 on IMDb from over 40,000 votes and 5.7 out of 10 on TMDB from around 888 votes. A critics' rating of 3.8 out of 10 from 83 reviews places it well below even those modest audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- The film states that the banker who offered to buy the farm had no specific goal. In the flashbacks featuring John Corbett's character after the crow attack, he is seen handing Corbett's character a notice of repossession/foreclosure. It was after this that the character's wife decided to leave him, and he subsequently killed all his loved ones. However, it is not explained where he was or what he did during the six years following the murders, nor why he remembered nothing until the moment of the crow attack.
- The original screenplay was written by Todd Farmer, while Stuart Beattie, Albert Torres, Marc Wheaton (who is also credited), Chad and Carey Hayes, Scott Derrickson with Paul Harris Bordman, Michael Gordon, and Richard d'Onofrio contributed further writing and revisions. Reshoots were supervised by Eduardo Rodriguez.
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