New Orleans and vampires have been connected in popular culture for so long that it can sometimes be difficult to determine where history ends and supernatural storytelling begins. That’s certainly the case with the Casket Girls, real women whose arrival in Louisiana nearly three centuries ago eventually inspired an elaborate legend involving mysterious trunks, a convent and vampires hidden away from the outside world. Now that story is providing the foundation for Casket Girls, a supernatural horror thriller starring Gabrielle Union and Mike Colter.
Aura Entertainment has acquired U.S. rights to the film, with international sales company Capture introducing it to buyers at the Toronto International Film Festival market. An official theatrical release date has not yet been announced. Directed by Justin G. Dyck, whose horror credits include Anything for Jackson and episodes of Creepshow, the film is produced by QC Entertainment, the company behind Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman.
Union stars as Detective Shay Williams, who, along with her partner Galpin (Colter), begins investigating a child’s seemingly supernatural encounter. That investigation leads the pair to a centuries-old New Orleans church, where they inadvertently release the legendary Casket Girls from beneath the building. With the detectives and a handful of other survivors trapped inside, they have to find a way to outwit the bloodthirsty vampires before they’re killed one by one. Raúl Castillo, Matt Frewer and Thomas Lennon round out the principal cast.
“Casket Girls is the kind of genre film we built Aura to release,” says Aura Entertainment CEO Marc Goldberg. “It’s a propulsive, character-driven horror thriller with a mythology as rich as its scares. Gabrielle Union and Mike Colter anchor this with real gravity, and QC’s instincts for elevated horror speak for themselves. We can’t wait to bring Detective Williams’ fight through the tunnels beneath New Orleans to audiences.”
Who Were the Real Casket Girls?
The mythology Goldberg refers to is what gives the film considerably more weight than a conventional story about people trapped in a building with vampires, because the Casket Girls have their origins in an actual chapter of Louisiana history. During the early 18th century, young French women were sent to French colonies in North America, including Louisiana, with the expectation that they would marry settlers and help establish families in the colony. They became known as the filles à la cassette, a name derived from the small chests or cases in which they carried their belongings.
The women who arrived in New Orleans were placed under the care of Ursuline nuns before marrying, and over the centuries their story became increasingly embellished. The small cassettes they carried became “caskets” in English retellings, while descriptions of the young women as pale after their long voyage helped transform an immigration story into something far more sinister. Eventually, tales developed that their possessions had been stored on an upper floor of the Ursuline Convent, that the windows there had been sealed and that vampires were being hidden inside.
There are variations of the story involving mysterious disappearances, bodies drained of blood and the possibility that the women themselves were vampires, but those elements belong to New Orleans folklore rather than the documented history of the women. What makes the legend particularly effective is the way relatively mundane details of the real story — young women arriving from France with small chests and being housed by nuns — evolved into the raw materials of a vampire tale. Casket Girls essentially takes that folklore and imagines what might happen if at least some of it turned out to be true.
Bringing the Casket Girls Legend to the Screen
In the mythology created for the film, the Casket Girls really were vampires who had remained hidden for centuries, only to be unleashed when Shay and Galpin investigate the church. That gives Dyck’s film an opportunity to combine a survival-horror premise with a supernatural legend specific to New Orleans rather than simply using the city as atmospheric background.
The screenplay was originally written by Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant, the team behind the Night at the Museum films, with revisions by Keith Cooper and Dyck. Sean McKittrick and Raymond Mansfield produce for QC Entertainment, while Edward H. Hamm Jr., Jameson Parker and Union serve as executive producers.
For Dyck, Casket Girls continues a move into horror that became particularly noticeable with 2020’s Anything for Jackson. That film centered on a grieving couple whose attempt to use a reverse exorcism to bring their grandson back from the dead goes badly wrong, earning Dyck considerable attention within the genre. He subsequently directed episodes of Shudder’s anthology series Creepshow.
Union’s involvement with Casket Girls extends beyond playing its lead character, as she also serves as an executive producer. Her recent credits include Riff Raff, alongside Jennifer Coolidge, Ed Harris and Bill Murray, as well as A24’s The Inspection. Colter, meanwhile, is particularly familiar to genre audiences from his role as Marvel’s Luke Cage and his four-season run as David Acosta on the supernatural series Evil.
Ella Field, EVP of International Sales at Capture, points to that combination of cast, filmmakers and subject matter as one of the reasons the company believes the film can work internationally. “Casket Girls is exactly the kind of elevated, commercial genre film we want to champion at Capture,” she says. “With an irresistible mythology, a fantastic ensemble led by Gabrielle Union and Mike Colter, and QC’s proven track record in the genre, it has true global appeal. We’re thrilled to be launching international sales at TIFF.”
For now, the question is when audiences will actually get to see the Casket Girls emerge from beneath that New Orleans church. Aura has not yet announced an official theatrical release date, but with U.S. distribution secured and international sales underway, the centuries-old vampire legend is moving closer to making its way to the screen.