Gabrielle Union To Produce & Star In Horror Pic ‘The Casket Girls’ From QC Entertainment

EXCLUSIVE: Fresh off the TIFF premiere of their new documentary Vice Is Broke, Get Out producer QC Entertainment has enlisted Gabrielle Union (Riff Raff) to star in The Casket Girls, a new horror film to be directed by Justin Dyck (Anything for Jackson), which they will produce and fully finance.

Written by Thomas Lennon & Robert Ben Garant (Night at the Museum), with revisions by Keith Cooper (Anything for Jackson) & Dyck, The Casket Girls is inspired by the true story of a group of young women sent from France to New Orleans to become brides to French colonists in the early 1700s. They arrived with small chests, or “caskets” of their belongings, hence the name given by locals. According to legend, upon the girls’ arrival, the homicide rate in New Orleans rose dramatically, with stories of men drained of their blood. The girls were blamed and feared to be demons or vampires, and for the city’s protection, they were imprisoned in the attic of the Vatican-controlled Ursuline Convent, which still stands today in the heart of the French Quarter, locked away behind an impenetrable door and windows bolted shut by nails blessed by the Pope himself.

The film takes place in today’s world as Detective Shay Williams (Union) and her partner become trapped inside the Ursuline Convent with a group of tourists when the Casket Girls escape from their attic prison for the first time in over 300 years.

QC Entertainment’s Sean McKittrick and Raymond Mansfield will produce the pic, with Union joining QC’s Edward H. Hamm Jr. as exec producer. Production is scheduled to commence in Victoria, BC, in association with British Columbia-based Lighthouse Pictures, on October 15. Jameson Parker will exec produce for Lighthouse Pictures. Atomic Honey is handling U.S. casting, alongside Kris and Kara Casting in Canada. 

Nominated for Gotham and Independent Spirit Awards for her starring turn opposite Jeremy Pope in A24’s The Inspection, Union earned an NAACP Image Award nomination as star and exec producer of Netflix’s rom-com The Perfect Find. Recently, she also produced Michael Showalter’s The Idea of You, starring Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine, which released in May to 50 million worldwide viewers on Prime Video, becoming Amazon MGM’s highest romantic-comedy debut of all time. Next up, she’ll be seen starring alongside Jennifer Coolidge, Ed Harris, and Bill Murray in the crime comedy Riff Raff, which is coming off its TIFF premiere.

Rated 97% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, Dyck’s horror debut Anything for Jackson, about a grieving couple’s satanic attempts to put their dead grandson’s soul in an unborn baby, premiered at Fantasia Festival in 2020. More recently, he’s helmed multiple episodes of Shudder’s Creepshow.

Led by partners McKittrick, Mansfield and Hamm Jr., QC Entertainment is best known for producing the Oscar winners Get Out and BlacKkKlansman — from filmmakers Jordan Peele and Spike Lee, respectively — having been involved in every aspect of both projects, from development to production and release. McKittrick also produced Peele’s sophomore feature Us, which notched the biggest opening ever for an original horror film, with QC most recently producing It Lives Inside, Bishal Dutta’s SXSW prize-winning horror-thriller released by Neon last September.

In television, QC has Richie Mehta’s true crime series Poacher, which premiered at Sundance and was released on Prime Video in February. The company’s first foray into non-fiction filmmaking led to financing and producing Eddie Huang’s Vice Is Broke, which examines Vice’s transformation from indie magazine to media behemoth.

Union is represented by CAA, Range Media Partners, and Felker Toczek Suddleson. Dyck and Cooper are repped by WME and Adam Goldworm of Aperture Entertainment. Lennon & Garant are both with Artists First and Jackoway Austen Tyerman, with UTA repping Lennon and CAA repping Garant.