'Demonic' enlists black ops priests in full trailer for Neill Blomkamp's first horror movie

Up to this point, all of the marketing materials for Neill Blomkamp's first-ever horror movie, Demonic, have been pretty vague. But the full trailer released today sheds some terrifying new light on more than a few crucial plot points. The thing we're most looking forward to? A team of black ops priest-soldiers trained up by the Vatican. Take that, Father Karras!

Arrow's Carly Pope headlines the film as a woman asked to enter a futuristic simulation, in which her estranged mother is currently residing after going on a homicidal rampage. Unable to discover the reason behind her mom's murderous MO, the woman re-enters the waking world — only to bring something malevolent along with her.

Check it out below:

Shot in Canada last summer amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the film was originally envisioned as a low-budget found footage project. "I was always a fan of The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity," Blomkamp said in June. "I was also a fan of the way that those filmmakers just went out and shot something in their backyard."

That all changed when the Chappie filmmaker was offered a bigger budget, but it didn't stop Blomkamp from wanting to be as indie as possible. "It's genuinely a child of the pandemic," he added. It was born out of, 'How do we go into the backwoods and shoot something while we're waiting [for the world to reopen]?'" 

Credit: IFC Midnight

According to distributor IFC Midnight, the production utilized "a patent-pending new method of using volumetric capture (a three-dimensional video technology that turns actors into geometric objects.)"

Chris William Martin (Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem) and Michael Rogers (Supernatural) co-star alongside Pope, who previously worked with Blomkamp on Elysium.

Demonic will begin to haunt our sleeping hours — as well as our waking ones — when it hits theaters, digital, and VOD Friday, Aug. 20.