With the backdrop of the drug war epidemic in Mexico, Issa López’s acclaimed film Tigers Are Not Afraid tells a powerful horror fairy tale in the vein of Guillermo del Toro’s early work. The Oscar-winning filmmaker himself praised the film, saying it’s “an unsparing blend of fantasy and brutality, innocence and evil. Innovative. Compassionate and mesmerizing.” After a successful festival, Shudder has now picked it up for a theatrical release this August and they’ve released a new trailer and poster.
Jared Mobarak said in his review, “López’s fairy tale is one seeking to remind us of an innocence not yet stripped clean. She puts Estrella and Shine onto the same path not by coincidence, but destiny. Both are alone due to the Huascas. Both are frightened of what might happen next, but not enough to lose the humanity that allows them to be better than their pursuers. López gives them each other as a means for security while also supplying a supernatural force that might just be more vicious than the men on their tail. It arrives in the form of a ghostly voice whispering through the lips of a body wrapped in plastic, following Estrella as a line of blood demanding its objective. It uses her imagination to raise the dead and reveal her strength.”
See the trailer and poster below.
A haunting horror fairytale set against the backdrop of Mexico’s devastating drug wars, TIGERS ARE NOT AFRAID follows a group of orphaned children armed with three magical wishes, running from the ghosts that haunt them and the cartel that murdered their parents. Filmmaker Issa López creates a world that recalls the early films of Guillermo del Toro, imbued with her own gritty urban spin on magical realism to conjure a wholly unique experience that audiences will not soon forget.
Tigers Are Not Afraid opens in New York on August 21 and LA and Toronto on August 23, followed by an expansion.