The Lucifer Effect

2012, 1 minutes

What happens to good people trapped in an evil place

The makers of a chilling new horror movie in which an actress was nearly throttled are to go ahead with the delayed premiere after police released the unedited footage. "The Lucifer Effect" 1 should have been shown at the Cannes Film Festival in May, but the production was delayed when police in the UK investigating the terrifying strangling incident seized the raw footage. The movie was then set to premiere at the Paramount Studios Screening Rooms in Melrose Avenue, Hollywood, California, on 27 October to coincide with the Halloween period but the director has since gone into hiding in Salvador, after unconfirmed reports in the Brazilian press, that one of the cast members has been hospitalized. The Blair Witch style footage was shot in an abandoned mental asylum in Lincolnshire 2 and is the first to explore director Tim Burke’s 3 controversial "enigmatic" technique 4 in which actors have no access to a script and no idea what is going on. In this case, the Film centers around 8 people that won, bought or were awarded - what they thought was a Role in a Movie called "The Harrowing" - only to be locked in the Abandoned Mental Asylum for three days as part of a social experiment. "The Lucifer Effect"is a reality movie that seeks to demonstrate the so-called "Lucifer Effect" 5 - a psychological condition brought about by trapping good people into an evil place; first, studied in the controversial 'Stanford Prison Experiment' in the 1970s, which had to be shut down as the students became increasingly abusive towards each other. The Film has since been picked up by a new documentary film crew who has heard about the recent peculiar happenings and with special permission from the film's abstruse executive producers, have decided to piece together the story. But, it has been rumoured across the Internet that the Film is cursed with viewers receiving strange things happen to them after watching the trailer. The new film makers may have got more than they bargained for as last week during a test screening; two girls had to receive medical attention. Emma Arthouse, a Film Critic who had been invited to the screening reported; "Yes, the Film producers say this was due to the subliminal graphics and flash photography sequences in the Movie, however reports have started to appear on the internet that could suggest there is something more mysterious at work." During an interview with The Soho Hotel Event's Manager he recalled; "Well, since the Film arrived for the screening some guests have reported hearing voices late at night in the cinema screening room and also after the movie finished the cinema's projection room door could not be opened and the lock had to be replaced". Now some industry insiders have suggested this is a marketing ploy from the film's producers but internet hype and movie buzz is growing and suggesting that the film itself is haunted and the trailer is being sent around the internet with the tagline "Whatever you do not watch this Video". The asylum, opened in 1902 and closed since 1997, had once been the site of horrific systematic abuse by staff of patients. The actors were locked into them derelict buildings for three days and left their own devices while 33 "Big Brother" CCTV cameras recorded them round the clock. They also had personal cameras to film each other and their own diary reactions. The film is made up of footage from all these cameras and no production crew were involved or present with the actors. The eight participants, 6 from around the world - USA, UK, UAE, Israel, Brazil - were free to do whatever they wanted with whatever they found in the buildings and to interact with them and each other as they pleased. They were not told about what had gone on there. The throttling occurred when one of the women "flipped" during an Ouija board session they had organised in the asylum’s spooky derelict chapel. She tried to strangle 28-year-old Scottish actress Natalia Celino. "What you see in this movie is what actually happened," said James Munroe, one of the Film's producers. "We didn’t script anything, or direct anything. We just brought together eight good people, put them in a place where much evil had occurred, and filmed whatever happened. The movie speaks for itself and is a powerful demonstration of how evil can continue to infest a location long after the events themselves have ended."