Antlers: Animal viscera flows freely in latest trailer for del Toro-produced horror movie

What lives in the Pacific Northwest and eats rotting animal carcasses? That's the million-dollar question in the official trailer for Scott Cooper's Antlers, a Guillermo del Toro-produced horror project that unravels a monstrous secret in a small Oregon town. Cooper, who co-wrote the screenplay with C. Henry Chaisson and Nick Antosca, has never directed a genre film until now.

In the first trailer from late August, we were introduced to Lucas Weaver (Jeremy T. Thomas), a young boy of few words who is keeping some sort of bloodthirsty creature in his home. In this new batch of footage, we learn that he actively goes out of his way to capture and kill small animals (like skunks) in order to feed the beast. Unfortunately, the thing gets loose and it's up to a local teacher (Keri Russell) and sheriff (Jesse Plemons) to get to the bottom of a head-scratching murder spree.

Watch the new trailer below:

The trailers may get the hairs on the back of your neck to stand up, but we're still unsure of plot specifics. Rather smartly, Fox Searchlight is choosing to rely on atmosphere and the viewer's imagination to string audiences along until the movie opens in the spring of 2020. Like the campaign for 2008's Cloverfield, these sparse teasers are sure to spark up dialogue about what the monster is and where it comes from. Even now, we have no clue about why the project is titled "Antlers."

"I was so influenced early on by the work of John Carpenter, like Halloween, or certainly The Exorcist which is a favorite of mine, or even Tarkovsky’s Stalker. So I’m able to bring all of that into one film which is exciting," Cooper told Collider in April of last year. “[Guillermo] said, 'I’ve obviously never seen you direct a horror film, but there’s a lot of horrific moments in your movies, so I’m more interested in someone who doesn’t work in that genre to step into it.' Which is I guess a bit like Friedkin in a sense, having not directing in that genre before he took on The Exorcist."

Graham Greene, Cody Davis, Amy Madigan, Rory Cochrane, Scott Haze, and Sawyer Jones make up the rest of the film's cast.

Antlers pokes its deadly horns into theaters on April 17, 2020.