Steve Elli­son preps his sopho­more fea­ture with sci-fi/hor­ror mind­ben­der Ash

With the instant, infi­nite acces­si­bil­i­ty of the inter­net, cult films don’t real­ly get mint­ed the way they used to, by obscu­ri­ty-trawlers turn­ing the like-mind­ed onto the weird detri­tus that might click with them. But there are a few marked excep­tions, one of the big ones being Steve Elli­son​‘s 2017 film Kuso, a work of sin­gu­lar­ly dis­gust­ing mag­nif­i­cence that’s slow­ly built a fol­low­ing from its slot in the library of hor­ror stream­ing ser­vice Shudder.

For five years, devo­tees of the allu­sive, trans­gres­sive, whol­ly inspired film work from the musi­cal poly­math also known as elec­tron­ic bound­ary-buster Fly­ing Lotus and masked rap­per Cap­tain Mur­phy have wait­ed for a fol­low-up. At long last, an exclu­sive from Dead­line has bro­ken the news that that film is offi­cial­ly in progress, and that it will also chart the out­ré fringes — albeit in a dif­fer­ent way.

Ellison’s sopho­more fea­ture has been revealed as Ash, a sci-fi/hor­ror project with a sur­vival­ist bent. The brief syn­op­sis pro­vid­ed in the arti­cle goes into slight­ly greater detail, explain­ing that the movie ​“watch­es as a woman wakes up on a dis­tant plan­et and finds the crew of her space sta­tion vicious­ly killed, her inves­ti­ga­tion into what hap­pened set­ting in motion a ter­ri­fy­ing chain of events.” (Kuso, it bears men­tion­ing, also fol­lowed sur­vivors of a cat­a­clysm as they sort through the dan­ger­ous world of wreckage.)

On Twit­ter, Elli­son has teased his vision for the new mind­ben­der, spec­i­fy­ing that Kuso was more about the body where Ash will be ​“more about the mind,” sug­gest­ing a pos­si­ble shift from the vis­cer­al gross-out delights of his last film to some­thing in the realm of the abstract. But he wants to be sure we under­stand it will kick ass regard­less, tweet­ing that ​“I’m mak­ing ​‘ASH’ with the same peo­ple who made ​‘Mandy’ and ​‘The Raid’ so u already knooow.”

Not so long ago, Elli­son stepped in as guest edi­tor for our sis­ter pub­li­ca­tion Huck, bring­ing with him a slew of friends and oth­er guests out­lin­ing the taste that shapes his dement­ed cin­e­mat­ic uni­verse. Any­one with David Lynch on speed-dial can be secure­ly relied on to deliv­er a mov­ing-pic­ture freak­out the likes of which we don’t see very often.