No one in a movie has a normal experience at boarding school. When a movie centers around characters at a school far away from home, it’s usually going in one of two directions: slapstick comedy or unrelenting horror. In the trailer for A24‘s upcoming release The Blackcoat’s Daughter, it’s definitely a case of horror we’re looking at.
The movie follows Katherine (Mad Men‘s Kiernan Shipka) as a student at a Catholic boarding school. Not all is well at this school, though. Some of the first narration we get is the discussion of a murder so violent that forensic testing had to match a severed head to a body. Katherine gets left at the boarding school over winter break, along with several staff members and fellow student Joan (Emma Roberts). The narrative is unclear from there, but there’s a lot of shots of potential weapons and bloodied bodies over a very creepy little tune, so suffice to say the situation deteriorates as the break goes on. Here’s the full trailer:
The Blackcoat’s Daughter will initially be available on February 16 exclusively on DirecTV before hitting limited theaters on March 31. The film was written and directed by Oz Perkins, who recently wrote and directed the Netflix horror film I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House.
