‘When I Consume You’ marks the third feature for New York-based filmmaker Perry Blackshear following his award-winning psychological horror feature debut ‘They Look Like People’ and celebrated sophomore effort, the aquatic supernatural horror romance ‘The Siren.’ All three of his films have been widely embraced and praised both on the festival circuit and upon release, with ‘They Look Like People’ winning a Jury Honorable Mention at the 2015 Slamdance Film Festival upon its premiere. We were lucky enough to have ‘When I Consume You’ as part of our Panic Fest 2022 programming. Now you can check it out for yourself on August 16 when it comes to all digital platforms.
Blackshear again teams up with creative collaborators MacLeod Andrews, Evan Dumouchel, and Margaret Ying Drake for ‘When I Consume You,’ who, alongside Libby Ewing, deliver a heartfelt family drama about grief and redemption. Ewing and Dumouchel play brother-sister duo Daphne and Wilson Shaw. Troubled since childhood, the two have struggled to find stability as they’ve grown older, and while Daphne seems to have finally gotten her life together, the darkness that’s followed their family all along begins to close in more aggressively than ever before.
Credit: 1091 PicturesWhen I Consume Youis the darkest film I’ve made. We reassembled the cast and producing team from my first two films with the addition of the incredible Libby Ewing, and shot on the streets of Brooklyn with oursmall crewduring the winter. With a team this intimate, the film becomes personal whether you want it to or not. The pain of growing up, thestruggle of knowing how to be hard enough to fight but soft enough to love, burned through the cast and crew. As I finished the edit, I realized the film isn’t just a slow-burn nightmare. Despite its grit and sadness, the film is fundamentally hopeful. This is why I love it. There is a hard-won steady message within the movie that emerged as we were all making it that continues to give me heart: The world is hard. Evil can never be defeated. Loving can bring pain. Live anyway. Fight anyway. Loveanyway. said Blackshear.
SYNOPSIS:
Siblings Daphne and Wilson Shaw practically raised one another. They’ve protected each other from everything life has thrown their way. Daphne’s professional life is soaring and she’s looking to adopt a child. Wilson is interviewing for a position at a local school, hoping to become a teacher. But Daphne has an unsettling, dangerous stalker whom she can’t seem to shake, and now threatens to destroy them both. They hunt for their tormentor through the shadowy streets of Brooklyn, honing their bodies and minds for a showdown. But this foe may prove to be more than they can handle. They will break and rebuild themselves if necessary to save each other, and protect the light they know is in this world for them… if only they can persevere.
A unique urban folktale set and filmed in Brooklyn, When I Consume You confronts the vulnerabilities that people struggle with every day through a genre lens to create a chillingly intimate indie horror nightmare.
The film is written, directed, and lensed by Blackshear, who also produced alongside Andrews, Dumouchel, and Ewing.
