Official selection
South by Southwest Film Festival 2021
Director
Morgan Galen King, Philip Gelatt
Writer
Morgan Galen King, Philip Gelatt
Cast
Larry Fessenden, Betty Gabriel, Richard E. Grant, Lucy Lawless, Joe Manganiello, Patton Oswalt, Jordan Douglas Smith
Producer
Will Battersby, Philip Gelatt, Jean Rattle
contact
RLJE Films
Join us after the screening on August 14 at 11:00pm EDT for a live Q&A with Directors Philip Gelatt and Morgan King, hosted by Jason Rockman.
“Extreme, skeleton-snapping ultraviolence”
– Guy Lodge, VARIETY
“This is hard fantasy, made by people who clearly know and love the form”
– Abby Olcese, ROGEREBERT.COM
“An ambitious, high-concept fantasy anthology epic that spans time, leaving a trail of bodies and entrails in its wake”
– Meagan Navarro, BLOODY DISGUSTING
Far and high amid icy wastes, a swamp witch from the lowlands makes her way to the mouth of a skull-shaped cave. Within lies a luminous blue flower... and the masked swordsman tasked with guarding it. On this one night, though, no blood will be spilled. Instead, it is tales that shall flow, each another link in a chain across the centuries, a cycle of greed, corruption, and treachery, of madness, massacre, and malignant magic. Time and time again, the thirst for knowledge and the power it brings is quenched by blood and fire...
Witchcraft and wizardry, war priests and winged slayers, elder gods and esoteric wisdom – THE SPINE OF NIGHT is a thing of high, hard fantasy in its most undistilled form, philosophically hefty, wildly imaginative, and gratuitously gruesome. The rotoscoped animation immediately recalls Ralph Bakshi’s FIRE AND ICE and LORD OF THE RINGS, and the legendary HEAVY METAL, three key titles in the tragically tiny list of animated excursions into swords and sorcery for adults. It’s not a satire nor a parody, homage or pastiche, not even a reimagining of the genre (though it thankfully dispenses with many of the retrograde, misogynist tropes that afflicted it). THE SPINE OF NIGHT, a painstaking labour of love from animator Morgan Galen King and filmmaker/comic scribe Philip Gelatt (and featuring the voices of Richard E. Grant, Lucy Lawless, Patton Oswalt, and Fantasia regular Larry Fessenden), is no less than a new, essential, fully realized work in the canon. – Rupert Bottenberg