Nails is a 2016 Irish horror film directed by Dennis Bartok, making his feature debut, from a screenplay co-written with Tom Abrams.
Bartok previously produced and wrote the Lionsgate horror Trapped Ashes in 2006, with segments directed by Joe Dante, Ken Russell, and Monte Hellman. He recently also co-wrote the non-fiction book A Thousand Cuts: the Bizarre Underground World of Collectors & Dealers Who Saved the Movies.
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Producers Brendan McCarthy and John McDonnell, of Fantastic Films, recent productions include Let Us Prey, The Hallow, Stitches, Wake Wood and Cherry Tree. The executive producer, Joseph Kaufman, was exec producer of John Carpenter’s 1976 classic Assault on Precinct 13 along with the 2005 remake.
Plot:
Happily married track coach and mother, Dana Milgrom, survives a near-death car accident only to find herself paralyzed and trapped inside her own body.
Forced to communicate via an artificial voice program and hooked to a breathing machine, she becomes convinced that a terrifying presence called “Nails” exists inside her hospital room. No-one believes her – not even her own husband and doctors, who think she’s experiencing a mental breakdown…
Fantastic Films and Kaleidoscope Film Distribution have announced that the film will be making its world premiere in Ireland as part of the Audi Dublin International Film Festival (ADIFF), which runs 16-26 February, 2017.
UK-based distributor and sales company Kaleidoscope Film Distribution will be releasing Nails theatrically and on VOD/SVOD in the U.K. and Ireland later in 2017, dates to be confirmed, and will be representing the film for world sales at the upcoming European Film Market at the Berlin Film Festival.
The film stars Scottish actress Shauna Macdonald as Dana Milgrom, which required long hours of makeup to create her graphic injuries and tremendous preparation and focus to portray a character who is paralyzed and forced to communicate via laptop for most of the film.
Macdonald was in Nail Marshall’s seminal horror film The Descent (2005) and its sequel (2009). British stand-up comedian and actor Ross Noble (Stitches) co-stars as Trevor Helms, a nurse’s aide at Hopewell Hospital who slowly comes to believe that Dana’s paranoid visions may be real.
The film also stars Steve Wall (of Irish band The Stunning), newcomer Leah McNamara and Richard Foster-King as “Nails”, with cinematography by James Mather (Frank) and music by longtime Gary Numan collaborator Ade Fenton.
Writer/director Dennis Bartok has commented: “Most horror films are about running away – Nails is the opposite: it’s about being locked inside your own flesh with the terror. I don’t think there’s any other actress who could give the performance Shauna did: her concentration and emotional rawness took the film to a whole different level.
