In commemoration of the defacto horror holiday Friday the 13th, STX Entertainment has released the official trailer for the upcoming horror/thriller movie Countdown. With a simple story about downloading a trendy new app on a smartphone going terribly wrong, those who use a strange “Countdown” app begin dying in mysterious fashion. Written and directed by Justin Dec, the movie stars Elizabeth Lail, Jordan Calloway, Talitha Bateman, Tichina Arnold, P.J. Byrne, and Peter Facinelli. John Rickard, Zack Schiller, Sean Anders, and John Morris produced the project, which is scheduled to release in theaters on Oct. 25, 2019.
In Countdown, a young nurse (Elizabeth Lail) downloads an app that claims to predict exactly when a person is going to die, and it tells her she only has three days to live. With time ticking away and death closing in, she must find a way to save her life before time runs out. You could almost say it’s like The Ring with a modern, technological twist, with an app giving your life an expiration date rather than a mysterious VHS tape. With the app seemingly killing anyone who downloads it, hopes for cheating an inevitable death begin to look slim. You can watch the official trailer for Countdown below.
There are certainly some comedic elements to be seen in Countdown, as we can tell from the trailer. It’s clear that the movie is in part offering a satirical take on smartphones and modern society’s dependence on such devices. On the internet, we’ve all seen those flash games and quizzes which have promised to tell us exactly when we’d die, but at worst all it really did was give viruses and malware to our machines. Countdown asks the basic question of how we might react if an app came out which undeniably predicted the exact time of your death. If you were given the opportunity to know and you accepted it, would you regret it? Would you prefer not knowing?
Clearly, some kind of paranormal force is at play here in Countdown, taking out those unlucky enough to try the new app. There are some shades of Final Destination when people realize death is coming when the counter reaches zero, but they have no idea where it’s coming from. We see glimpses of a demonic woman and her ghoulish hands grabbing some of the app users, presumably ripping them apart when their time runs out. The survivors theorize that escaping their impending deaths is just a matter of cheating time by just one second, but we’ll see when we watch the movie if this is just wishful thinking.
Countdown is counting down the days until it debuts in theaters on Oct. 25, 2019. Just in time for the big holiday during the Halloween season, it looks like a fun little horror movie to check out on the big screen. It certainly looks to be a bit more fun than scary, but also seems that it will make for a very entertaining watch. The official trailer for Countdown comes to us from STX Entertainment on YouTube.
