If you couldn’t keep up with film news this past weekend, we’re not going to blame you—that is, if you spent time with your mother, instead. Now that the long-distance phone calls and Sunday brunches are over, check out the indie film news that you probably missed. This weekend saw a lot of casting rumors and next projects for up-and-coming indie and genre filmmakers and comedians, as well as an opportunity to contribute to film history.

Indiegogo Campaign Created to Complete Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind

On the celebrated 100th birthday of the great auteur Orson Welles, The Hollywood Reporter announced that there was some hope for his final, unfinished project The Other Side of the World. A group of producers, including Filip Jan Rymsza, Jens Koethner Kaul and Frank Marshall, have started a crowd-sourcing campaign to raise the funds in order to complete the film thought lost. Check out the Hollywood Reporter article for the amazing backstory on how this came together. If you wish to be a part of history and contribute toward the $2 million goal, see the Indiegogo page. Like all Indiegogo projects, there are a number of tiered incentives, ranging from copies of the finished film, exclusive posters, your own 35mm print and Welles’ personal journal – the last one will set you back 50k.

Vincenzo Natali to Adapt Stephen King and Joe Hill

Last week we included a news story that Vincenzo Natali’s Cube was set for a re-visioning. Well now we know the genre filmmaker’s own next project—an adaptation of Stephen King/Joe Hill collaboration In the Tall Grass. Screen Daily first announced the news. The novella, which first appeared in Esquire, is a stripped down horror tale about a brother and sister who react to a young boy’s cry for help deep within a Kansas field. Natali typically works from his own scripts, but small-set horror with larger, metaphysical elements are right up his alley.

Paul Feig to Produce Film Penned by Broad City Co-Stars

Paul Feig is suddenly one of the hottest directors in Hollywood—early reviews of his upcoming Spy have been overwhelmingly positive and he has the lady-version Ghostbusters on the horizon. And now The Hollywood Reporter first reports that he will team up with two of the hottest young comedians for their film breakout. Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson, the duo behind the Comedy Central hit Broad City have sold an untitled script to 20th Century Fox, with Feig attached to produce. Not much else is known yet about the project, though it is not a Broad City feature and Glazer and Jacobson are not currently attached to star. We can only hope their first starring roles come soon, hopefully this is a step towards that.

Natalie Portman in Talks for Alex Garland’s Next Film

Alex Garland’s Ex Machina has performed well with both critics and audiences (a little more on that in a bit), making him a director to watch. His next project has already been announced as an adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Annihilation, and now he may have a star attached. According to Variety, Natalie Portman is currently in talks for the leading role, with the likes of Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton vying to co-star. Since Portman’s Oscar win, she’s appeared in a pair of Thor films and not much else. A turn in serious sci-fi with this pedigree behind it could be a welcome return to form.

Indie Box Office Update

While Avengers: Age of Ultron continued to dominate the box office this weekend, it was relatively quiet on the indie end. In its fifth weekend, Ex Machina expanded to 2,000 theaters and rebounded after a drop the weekend before, earning about $3.5 million. It now has raised a healthy $24 million worldwide. Far from the Madding Crowd expanded to 99 theaters in its second weekend, with a $7,687 average. The Apu Trilogy revival and profile doc I Am Big Bird both opened in one theater and subsequently had the two largest per screen averages aside from the Marvel juggernaut, with $16,000 and $10,000, respectively.

Trailer of the Week: Unexpected

Cobie Smulders and Anders Holm get the chance to lead a film in Unexpected, a dramatic comedy about the (unexpected) effects of an (unexpected) pregnancy. Samantha is a teacher at a Chicago inner-city high school who strikes up a friendship with one of her students in the same situation. Unexpected is directed by Kris Swanberg, the wife of noted indie filmmaker Joe Swanberg—a big jump in production level from her previous film Empire Builder, a very good film that made festival rounds in 2012 but was difficult to see. Thankfully, you’ll be able to see Unexpected when it comes to limited release on July 24. Check out the trailer below!

Well-suited for its Halloween release, Alexandre Aja‘s (The Hills Have Eyes, High Tension) devilish new film, Horns, is a dark cross-genre film. Highly saturated with the colors of the Pacific Northwest and starring a 5 o’clock shadowed Daniel Radcliffe, the film is based on the novel by Joe Hill (mini-clone and son to Stephen King). With its similar setting and a heavy dose of maniacal absurdity at play, Horns has a tinge of Twin Peaks sensibility to it, but its far-too-fast pace and loosely formed mystery leave it short of such cult status. Overall, with Radcliffe in the lead and solid co-star performances, the film does still manage to intrigue and the imagery of it all will please horror fans looking for a strange Pan’s Labyrinth style scary-fantasy.

Equal parts tragic-romance, dark-comedy, and straight-up horror, Radcliffe plays Ig Perrish, a young man in a dark place after the recent death of his long-time girlfriend Merrin (Juno Temple, seen in flashback). Harassed by the media and questioned by those closest to him, Ig maintains his innocence despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. His lifelong best friend Lee (Max Minghella) is now a lawyer and doing his best to defend Ig during the investigation and trial. After a late-night candlelight vigil is held for Merrin by her grief-besotted father (David Morse), Ig goes on a particularly bad bender, ending up in bed with a trashy old friend, Glenna (Kelli Garner). Adding to the confusion of Ig’s life, he wakes up in her bed the next morning with something worse than an STD — horn tips are making their way out of Ig’s forehead.

After a particularly strange interaction with Glenna, who continues to ask Ig for permission to eat all her donuts, he rushes to the doctor for advice. Instead everyone he interacts with seems to want to tell him all the bad impulses and thoughts they are having. A mother in the waiting room expresses her disdain for her screaming child, the doctor asks permission to crush up some Oxycontin and snort it. Searching for respite at his parent’s home only leads to their own confessions of the grudge they hold against him for putting their lives into uproar and their doubts that he didn’t murder Merrin. Eventually Ig realizes by touching people he can see the bad things they’ve done, and an interaction with his musician brother Terry (Joe Anderson) gives Ig new insight into Merrin’s death, while also helping him realize he can use his new powers to get to the bottom of what happened to her.

As the deceased Merrin, Juno Temple manages to hold up the chemistry between her and Radcliffe in the flashback scenes. But Radcliffe’s best work in the film is definitely when he’s being evil and revenge-driven. His British sarcasm is put to good use, even though he hides the accent quite well. Cinematographer Frederick Elmes is put to great use with the film, creating some truly lovely scenes with color and light in the flashbacks that contrast with the darker present day scenes. A sometime collaborator with David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, and Charlie Kaufman, he seems to get the magical reality quality these directors love so much. The only artistic note I’m not sure I entirely understand is putting much of the most frightening action in broad daylight. While still brutally gruesome at moments, the tension would have been a bit more dramatic if it had that class horror element to it.

The slight variances from the novel (which I happened to have read) are subtle and sensible, though a fault of translation, especially in horror, is that much of the tension lies within being in the mind of a villain. A perk the novel maintains over the film. The build to the film’s final reveal seems weak. Though the final showdown is formidable enough. The film’s (and to be honest, the book’s) biggest failing has to do with some padding at the end to soften the blow of how much tragedy we’re forced to endure and provide some unnecessary character motivation. It tries to justify some of the death and comes across as insensitive instead. An unnecessary afterthought that no proper horror film would ever ascribe to.

Full of language and grittiness, Horns suffers from what most multi-genre films do, a bit of a scattered personality and an inability to do it all. But the juggling act is still an amusing thing to behold, and all of the devil jokes and imagery are just fun. Those with an appreciation for the macabre and the fantastical will appreciate the strange brew that is Horns.

Horns is out in theaters in the US October 31st, and is currently available to stream via VOD.