Demonic Thriller ‘Sator’ Summoned for February 2021 Release
Jordan Graham’s striking and acclaimed demonic thriller Sator will be released digitally in North America in February, and a new official trailer and poster were unveiled this week to prepare us for the arrival.
The uniquely spectral horror-thriller Sator teases the line between fact and fiction, as its core story, of a demon making contact with an intimate family, is inspired by director Jordan Graham’s own life, according to the press release.
“Sator is quite personal to me,” says Graham. “It delves into my family’s dark history with mental illness surrounding a supernatural entity, and uses home video footage to create an interwoven piece between documentary and fiction.”
For years generations of his family, including his grandmother, have claimed to make contact with a mysterious presence by the name of Sator, and the film features her own haunting accounts of contact.
The film is written, directed, produced, edited, scored, and lensed by Graham, who took seven years to complete the feature. It stars newcomers Michael Daniel, Aurora Lowe, Gabriel Nicholson, and Rachel Johnson alongside Graham’s late grandmother, June Peterson.
Called “simultaneously heartbreaking and chilling” by Dread Central and “strikingly atmospheric” by Variety, Sator is a dive into psychologically driven horror and a shockingly real meditation on mental illness, generational trauma, and the occult.
The official synopsis: Secluded in a desolate forest home to little more than the decaying remnants of the past, a broken family is further torn apart by a mysterious death. Adam, guided by a pervasive sense of dread, hunts for answers only to learn that they are not alone; an insidious presence by the name of Sator has been observing his family, subtly influencing all of them for years in an attempt to claim them.
In a released Director’s Statement, Graham explains further: “I belong to a family whose members heard voices. Whether these illusory sounds were due to mental illness, psychosis, or a susceptibility to hearing some other- worldly communications will never be known. What is known is that the auditory “hallucinations” suffered by my grandmother, her mother, and even her mother’s mother ultimately resulted in psychiatric hospitalizations and, in my great-grandmother’s case, suicide. Yet, despite intensive psychiatric intervention, my grandmother insisted that the entity, Sator, was no figment of her imagination or the result of mental illness, but very real. Also very real in this film, despite its fictional premise, is my grandmother relating her unique and hauntingly personal experiences of these encounters while her memory of them was still intact. Sadly, since the film’s 2013 inception, dementia has removed most of her memories of me, her family, and of her participation in this film. Yet the one “person” whose memory she retains to this day is Sator.”
Sator will arrive on Digital VOD platforms on Feb. 9, 2021, from 1091 Pictures.
You can watch the official trailer and view the poster below.
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