Neill Blomkamp returns with horror tale 'Demonic': Here's the trailer for his first feature film in 6 years

It's been a little over six years since director Neill Blomkamp graced the silver screen with the release of 2015's Chappie. After a hiatus (in which he's mainly been working on shorts and video games), the acclaimed District 9 filmmaker has finally returned to the world of features with Demonic.

Secretly shot in Canada amid the COVID-19 pandemic last summer, the horror film just dropped the first official spine-tingling trailer ahead of its wide rollout — courtesy of IFC Midnight — later this summer.

Also written by Blomkamp, Demonic follows a young woman (played by Elysium's Carly Pope) who "unleashes terrifying demons when supernatural forces at the root of a decades old rift between mother and daughter are revealed," reads the official synopsis. Chris William Martin (Supergirl) and Michael Rogers (Siren) co-star.

Watch the terrifying trailer now:

While this is Blomkamp's first feature-length foray into the horror genre, he still described the project as "a crossover between science fiction and horror" during an interview with Entertainment Weekly back in April. That's evidenced by the main character undergoing some sort of Inception-looking therapy that allows her to access dreams and/or memories. The only problem is something sinister follows her back into the waking world. That said, Demonic feels more like Brad Peyton's Incarnate than it does Christopher Nolan's Inception.

"For a long time, I've been really interested in films like Paranormal Activity, and lower budget stuff that is pretty terrifying, and so we just started working on this concept," Blomkamp told EW. "It grew and it got bigger than films like Paranormal Activity, but it was cut from the same cloth really. So that's what it is. We made use out of a lot of the locations out here and just shot it through the summer."

Demonic heads to theaters, digital, and VOD Friday, Aug. 20.