Trailer and Stills Wash Up for Sunset on the River Styx
A Budding Romance is Complicated by a Bloodsucking Death Cult
Filmmaker Aaron Pagniano Returns to Cinequest with Debut Feature
Writer/director Aaron Pagniano (We Got a Monkey’s Paw) has revealed the first look at his first feature-length film, Sunset on the River Styx. A chance meeting of two morose lovers sends them spiraling down a surreal rabbit hole. Their relationship will be challenged by their pasts, their futures, their perception of time, and a vampire death cult. Sunset on the River Styx will world premiere at the 2020 Cinequest Film & Creativity Festival. Pagniano returns to Cinequest, where his award-winning occult adventure short We Got a Monkey’s Paw screened last year.
In a swampy Florida city, a metro bus driver named Will lives a repetitive and purposeless life. His routines are interrupted by Ashe, whose bleak existential rhetoric engages him and introduces him to a strange world of the undead. Will follows Ashe into a death cult, led by a charismatic vampire. But he panics, disrupting a ritual before transformation is completed, and Will and Ashe find themselves trapped in the no-man’s-land between life and death, detached from conventional time and space. Will and Ashe must escape this fragmented landscape of past and present demons before it’s too late.