‘Invoking Yell’ Director Patricio Valladares Takes on Dante’s ‘Inferno’ With ‘The Divine Comedy’
Patricio Valladares is heading into Dante’s vision of Hell for The Divine Comedy, a supernatural horror feature that reimagines the 14th-century poem for a contemporary setting.
Dublin-based Skincrawl Studios has released a first look at the film following the completion of principal photography. The company is handling worldwide sales and plans to introduce a teaser trailer to international buyers at the upcoming American Film Market.
Valladares, the Chilean filmmaker behind Invoking Yell, directs from a screenplay by Loris Curci, whose credits include The Ghosts of Monday and Havana Darkness. The film specifically draws from Inferno, the first section of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy.
The adaptation follows Dante, a grieving writer who enters the realm of the dead in an attempt to retrieve his deceased wife, Beatrice. His guide is Virgil, reimagined for the film as a former priest who accompanies Dante through a succession of increasingly dangerous circles of Hell.
Along the way, the pair encounter supernatural entities and manifestations connected to guilt, desire and suffering as Dante continues his journey toward Beatrice.
Christopher Rygh, whose credits include Vikings: Valhalla, leads the cast alongside Matthew Metcalfe, Tilda Metsola and Fadhillah Othman.
Curci said the production concentrated exclusively on the Inferno portion of Dante’s poem while placing particular emphasis on the relationship between Dante and Virgil.
“The challenge here was to turn Dante’s Inferno into a visual experience,” Curci told Variety. “We took into account only the Hell segment of The Divine Comedy.”
The screenwriter said the adaptation also changes Beatrice’s role while incorporating elements drawn from Greek tragedy and classical mythology. Dante’s original work itself incorporated figures and concepts from Greek and Roman mythology into its depiction of the afterlife.
Curci described the resulting film as a modern fantasy-horror interpretation rather than a direct recreation of the source material. He also called it Skincrawl’s most ambitious production to date despite its limited budget.
The Divine Comedy is a co-production between Italy’s Anxur Films and Skincrawl Limited. Alessandro Gatto produces for Anxur, while Corrado Camilla and Curci produce for Skincrawl.
The project reunites Valladares and Curci after previously working together on the director’s 2017 horror film Nightworld. Valladares’ earlier genre credits also include Hidden in the Woods, while his more recent work has included the found-footage horror films Invoking Yell and Invoking Scream, both written with Barry Keating.
Invoking Yell is currently available through Shudder in multiple territories. Invoking Scream recently screened at FrightFest in London and is scheduled for a theatrical release in Chile next year.
Skincrawl plans to present The Divine Comedy to buyers at the American Film Market before bringing the project to the European Film Market in Berlin early next year.
“We’ll have a teaser-trailer ready for AFM and plan to have the film screened at the Berlin film market in February,” Skincrawl’s Corrado Camilla said.
Camilla added that the company intends to pursue a festival run following the market screenings as it evaluates potential audiences and territories for the film.
Skincrawl’s other recent projects include Giorgio Bruno’s The Sarajevo Murders, which follows the disappearance of a documentary crew in Bosnia and is distributed in the United States by Cleopatra Entertainment. The company also has Curci’s Island of the Minotaur in post-production, centered on an archaeological team that awakens an ancient bull-headed creature beneath a forbidden island.
With principal photography now complete, The Divine Comedy will next head to the international sales market as Skincrawl prepares its first teaser for AFM.
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