Get Your Halloween Alien Terror Started Right With New Orleans-filmed Romp ‘No One Will Save You’
I kid – it’s not really a “romp.” More like…an existential hellscape of alien-induced fear sweats.
No One Will Save You, starring Kaitlyn Dever as the “terrified alone person in a cabin who must fight aliens to the death”, premiered on September 22nd on Hulu as a Hulu original film. Yeah, we’re talking about it because it’s a product of the Louisiana film landscape, but it’s five weeks out from Halloween and this is one of the first dainty nibbles on the season’s charcuterie board of horror. So, let’s give it a taste.
The Premise.
No One Will Save You leans into one of the most basic and effective writing techniques: find out what a character loathes, and then drown them in it. A character afraid of water has to go out on a boat. The character who hates children gets stranded in a dinosaur theme park with children. In Writer and Director Brian Duffield’s No One Will Save You, he thrusts a protagonist burdened with anxiety into an alien invasion.
At the surface level, this film utilizes simple horror tropes: lonely person isolated in a cabin. Strange terrors outside the walls. Having to turn into a badass using only household tools like a box cutter. At its heart, this is a true throwback alien invasion film.
Duffield (who also wrote Love and Monsters) gave several interviews preceding the premiere, and in more than one he expressed his enthusiasm for developing scares through the idea of classic “grey aliens.” Here, he talked to Bloody Disgusting from a September 5th interview:
I grew up loving obviously aliens, but also Grays in particular. In a weird way, I felt like they were underused in movies, especially in the last decade or two, where I think we’d gone the other way and were getting into more squiddy kind of fellas or just really abstract alien designs in that post-Independence Day world. I really wanted to make a movie with the classic emoji Gray because, again, I just hadn’t felt like I’d seen enough of them, especially for such a classic movie monster.
Duffield mentioned in multiple interviews the idea that some alien films – like 2002’s Signs – had the aliens hidden for most of the film and didn’t reveal them until the end. This is not one of those films. From a September 21st Screen Rant interview:
I wanted the audience and Kaitlyn, there’s something downstairs. She sees a shadow, she’s like, “Oh, it’s a burglar.” And then she sees a little piece of the creature and realizes it’s an alien. And so just by that little glimpse of it, I wanted her and the audience to go, “Alien. Done. Know what it is, all on the same page, go.” And so there’s never really a moment for me that the audience and Kaitlyn aren’t on the same page. Like you said, it’s like you want to feel like they’re holding hands and experiencing it together. And so having them, everyone goes, they see the glimpse and without having to say, “Alien,” everyone can go, “Alien.”
The trailer itself throws vibes of a movie like A Quiet Place, where an individual or small group is terrorized by home-invading alien creatures. If you really want to dig deep, the idea that Kaitlyn Dever’s neighbors in the film are somehow inhabited by these invading stalkers evokes 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
So, how about its location?
This is a film driven by Kaitlyn Dever, a complete showcase for her performance in closed spaces. Duffield spoke about her presence in almost every scene of the film, and in the September 21st Screen Rant interview, talked about Kaitlyn’s relationship with a production based in New Orleans:
The crew! I don’t want to say I’ve never been part of something like this, but the crew loved Kaitlyn. Kaitlyn loved the crew. It was really cool. Because she’s on every frame, you want all the crew to show up for that person, way more so than me…And I know, I think there was projects she was going to do in New Orleans until the strikes and everything, and I knew the crew was all trying to get on it. And that was so cool. It made everyone’s life so easy where you’re like, Kaitlyn…I’m the leader by the fact that I’m the director, but Kaitlyn is the movie.
Kaitlyn Dever in No One Will Save You (photo courtesy of Hulu)
The credits show a film anchored by a locally Louisiana-sourced crew, with Script Supervisor David Bush, who we wrote about last year for his Fable House-produced meta-mockumentary film, Phony, and stuntman Sean Paul Braud, who has performed stunts on Louisiana-based projects from Renfield to Mayfair Witches and Twisted Metal.
I’ve got three hours in my Friday night, room for a double feature…
Okay, you’ve got:
- A strong female lead boxed into an isolated home with some hammers and box cutters.
- An orgy of purposefully classic aliens crawling and growling around a village with the intent to kill.
- A sound department anchored by artists like Chris Terhune, who worked on the tension-filled Prey and The Last Of Us series, so if you turn off the lights and put on the surround sound, you’re gonna feel it.
It was recommended to us by a…shall we say, Baton Rouge gourmand of horror cinema, that the 2023 horror film Jules starring Ben Kingsley and Harriet Sansom Harris would be a wonderful happy, light alien invasion movie to start the evening as a precursor to No One Will Save You. This one right here:
Then the night air grows chilled. A swift breeze rustles the curtains and a crisp and tense melancholy drifts through that wasn’t felt a few minutes ago. It’s late September. The wind chimes tinkle out their creepy notes. Is it time for a movie that will make you sweat for 90 minutes like you just ate a brick of ham? Heck yeah.
But if you finish No One Will Save You and hear a thump on the roof, it’s time to search for the nearest hammer.
No One Will Save You premiered on September 22nd in the U.S. on Hulu and is available for streaming outside the U.S. on Disney+.
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Fable House is a video production company based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana that specializes in production for film, video, commercials, and TV. Our team are experts in physical production, post-production, and VFX. We produce content for major brands, TV networks like Syfy and Lifetime, and provide production services to Louisiana’s never-say-die indie filmmakers.