The stylish throwback horror short, ‘The Daughters of Virture’ is now available to watch exclusively on ALTER. We had the pleasure to bring it to Panic Fest in 2018 as part of our Short Film Showcase programming. Now you can watch it below.
The short is set in the 80’s and focuses on Alice, a lonely housewife and mother, that hosts a local women’s prayer group. What begins as a routine meeting soon morphs into a fanatical intervention when the group confronts Alice over a dark secret she is hiding. When Betty, the group’s zealous leader, receives a vision from God that Alice is more than what she seems, the women become convinced a malevolent force is corrupting Alice and set out to rid her soul of evil.
The director, Michael Escobedo, is an American who grew up overseas, he experienced American culture from afar. After being raised in a Mexican/Vietnamese household and with an upbringing of exposure to various foreign cultures, he has always been drawn to tell stories of people and settings that are not of his own experience.
With this mindset, he wrote ‘The Daughters of Virtue’ because he wanted to focus on a demographic rarely explored within the horror genre: the rural, midwestern housewife.
The seed of this story was planted with a feature script Michael wrote in the fall of 2009 and it has been an arduous process of refinement and shifting concepts to become what it is today: the story of woman who’s come to understand the sacrifices she’s made to live the life she has. A compromise we all make.
“I would like to extend my gratitude to the cast and crew who worked so hard to make this film a reality. I am proud of the wonderfully diverse cast and crew we assembled to make this female driven horror film, a term we embrace. Every day working on this film was a pleasure and I hope that it shows on screen.”
– Michael Escobedo
ALTER
