Dusty Motel Mayhem in ‘Kill Trip’ First Look

A haunting new glimpse at Kill Trip has arrived as production wrapped on Kristian McKay’s first American feature in Bastrop, Texas. The horror thriller gathers Samaire Armstrong in her latest genre turn alongside Stelio Savante and Corin Nemec as three people whose road-trip detour turns into a fight for survival. Todd Jenkins, Brittany McVicker and a clutch of newcomers including Tate Christensen and Diletta Guglielmi round out the principal cast in a story that melds back-road isolation with the creeping dread of a town that seems to have slipped through the cracks of time.

McKay, co-producer through Obscura Films with Daunesh Alcott, worked from his own script to place a soft-spoken van driver at the centre of his plot. A simple lift for stranded festival-goers soon leads the group to a motel where hospitality dissolves into horror and friends vanish before dawn. Early stills capture Armstrong’s determined stare, Savante’s guarded watchfulness and Nemec’s tense posture as the trio navigates dusty streets and motel corridors. The film’s premise raises questions about trust and desperation in a famine-decimated future, offering a fresh take on the classic “strangers in a strange land” scenario.

McKay arrives in the US after directing the South American thriller Ventaja, which won the Golden Palm Award at the 2018 Mexico International Film Festival and the Audience Award at NewFilmmakers LA the same year. Ventaja enjoyed an eight-week run in Cinemark Cinemas and was Ecuador’s submission for the Academy Award in Best Foreign Film. With Kill Trip, McKay enlists a cast that brings both experience and new energy to his urban-meets-rural nightmare. Filming on location in the Texas heat tested both cast and crew but also provided the film with its sun-baked, uncanny backdrop.

With Kill Trip this first look suggests that Kristian McKay’s road-horror may stake a claim among the genre’s most unsettling journeys.