LIMERICK-made horror film ‘The Perished’ will be putting the fear into viewers on Amazon Video in the UK and Ireland from this week.
The award-winning drama, written and directed by local filmmaker, Paddy Murphy, has been hailed by critics since its release two years ago as an “impressively dark tale rooted in real life horrors”.
A meditation on the treatment of women in Ireland, ‘The Perished’ takes on the incredibly challenging subject of abortion rights and bodily autonomy.
This intersects with the discussion of societal punishment, the role religion has had to play in the control of women’s bodies and the various perspectives on this incredibly personal decision brought to the fore in the Abortion Referendum of 2018.
Murphy, who came to film from a background in video game development, told the Limerick Post that he started working on the script after he learned about the discovery of up to 800 baby graves outside the former Mother and Baby Home in Tuam.
“My mind immediately empathised with the spirits of those lost children, imagining how confused they would be. They would want to be loved.
“That formed the impetus to begin writing ‘The Perished’ and the script got shaped quite a lot by what I saw during the referendum to repeal the Eighth Amendment in 2018.
“I also consulted with the film’s lead actress and other members of the cast and crew to ensure that the female characters were believable and well realised,” he explained.
The film was released in the US across a number of video-on-demand (VOD) platforms in April 2020 and received very strong praise from established horror centric websites like Dread Central, Wicked Horror and Horror News Network.
Acclaimed horror critic and author, Kim Newman, gave the film a glowing review out of FrightFest in August 2019.
The Perished stars award-winning actress Courtney McKeon as Sarah Dekker, a young woman tormented by the spirits of the unborn who seek a mother.
Inspired by films such as ‘Don’t Look Now’ and ‘The Changeling’, it is now showing on Amazon Video.
