The director of The Raid gets his Wicker Man on in the Apostle trailer

By Katie Rife | September 17, 2018 | 5:43pm

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Gareth Evans is known for bone-crunching action—he’s the writer/director behind the original The Raid (2011) and its sequel, The Raid 2 (2014)—and the trailer for his new film Apostle promises more of the same, but different. This film, a period piece starring Dan Stevens as a man trying to save his sister from a sinister cult, sees Evans taking on the folk-horror genre. That particular subgenre, epitomized by The Wicker Man, is basically religious horror with a pre-Christian pagan flair, and this trailer, featuring all manner of medieval torture devices, promises an especially gruesome take on same. (That’s how we interpreted the line, ““God is pain. God is suffering,” anyway.)