Steven Soderbergh, the director behind such iconic films as Contagion, Ocean’s 11, and Traffic, has mostly been releasing movies to streaming only since 2018. But next year, his latest film will play on theater screens everywhere. We now have a teaser trailer for Presence, a supernatural horror film from the POV of the ghost. You can check out the creepy teaser for NEON Films’ Presence, starring Lucy Liu, Julia Fox, and Chris Sullivan, right here:
David Koepp, the screenwriter behind movies like Jurassic Park and Spider-Man, is the writer for Presence. The film is from NEON, who just released one of the most successful indie horror hits of the year with Longlegs. All of this feels like the perfect storm to create another word-of-mouth horror hit at the box office. Soderbergh has gone directly to streaming for many of his serious dramatic films in the last several years. But horror continues to dominate at the box office alongside traditional blockbusters. Based on the Presence trailer, this film could absolutely be the next Longlegs or Immaculate.
Presence debuted earlier this year at Sundance, and has an early Rotten Tomatoes score of 91%. This bodes well for the film becoming a surprise breakout sleeper hit. They shot the film during the writers actors’ strikes of 2023, thanks to a special SAG-AFTRA agreement for certain indie films in production at the time. Apparently, Presence is told entirely from the first-person perspective of the ghost but we don’t know too much about its storyline. (Shades of The Sixth Sense perhaps?) Maybe the scary element to this story is the living breathing humans, and not the dearly departed. Thanks to NEON and A24, we’re in a great era for horror films right now.
NEON currently plans to release Presence on January 15, 2025.