Lucy has voiced a character called TZOD in the animated fantasy “The Spine of Night” that has been described as “Ultra-violent, fantasy epic, ancient dark magic falls into sinister hands and unleashes ages of suffering onto mankind. A group of heroes from different eras and cultures must band together in order to defeat it at all costs.”
The 2021 SXSW Film Festival will feature this feature online on March 16 to 20, 2021.
Cast List: Richard E. Grant, Lucy Lawless, Patton Oswalt, Betty Gabriel, Joe Manganiello, Larry Fessenden, Nina Lisandrello, Abby Savage, Tom Lipinski, Patrick Breen (World Premiere)
VARIETY – Feb 11, 2021
In one of the first big deals of the upcoming SXSW Film Festival, emerging genre sales company Yellow Veil Pictures has acquired the global sales rights for the animated fantasy “The Spine of Night.”
Directed by Philip Gelatt and Morgan Galen King, the film is set to have its world premiere in the SXSW Midnighters section of the festival, which runs virtually from March 16–20. The cast includes Richard E. Grant (“Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker”), Lucy Lawless (“Ash Vs. Evil Dead”), Patton Oswalt (“A.P. Bio”), Betty Gabriel (“Get Out”), and Joe Manganiello (“Magic Mike XXL”), and featuring Abby Savage (“Orange Is the New Black”), Larry Fessenden (“The Dead Don’t Die”), and Rob McClure (Broadway’s “Beetlejuice”).
Described as an ultra-violent, epic fantasy, “The Spine of Night” was hand-rotoscoped in the style of cult classic animator Ralph Bakshi and designed to evoke the style of formative fantasy artist Frank Frazetta. (Bakshi and Frazetta collaborated on the 1983 animated fantasy “Fire and Ice.”) The story is set in a land of magic and showcases heroes, each from a different era and culture, contending with a malevolent force that could send humanity back into barbarism.
“‘The Spine of Night’ was made as a bold-faced love letter to a classic style of animation in the service of telling a fantasy story rich in theme and wild in imagination,” says Gelatt and King in a joint statement. “Given their devotion to boundary-pushing genre material, we can’t imagine a better partner on the film than Yellow Veil.”
“The images born of the classic era of adult-theme animation are given a new, modern lease on life in ’The Spine of Night,'” added Yellow Veil Pictures co-founder Joe Yanick. “It’s a seven-year labor of love that offers so much more than nostalgic fluff, but rather mines new depths in a beloved genre.”
Based in New York City and Los Angeles, Yellow Veil Pictures was founded in 2018 by Hugues Barbier, Justin Timms and Yanick as a worldwide film sales company that concentrates exclusively on genre cinema that pushes boundaries and emerging filmmakers who work in commercial, arthouse cinema. The company launched at the 2018 Frontières market at the Fantasia International Film Festival, and has worked on the debuts of Josh Lobo (“I Trapped the Devil”), A.T. White (“Starfish”), Matthew Pope (“Blood on Her Name”), and Jack Henry Robins (“VHYES”). Yellow Veil is also the festival agent for Shudder films “La Llorona,” “Blood Quantum,” “Host,” “Horror Noire,” and “The Ranger.”