Rising genre filmmaker Caleb Phillips has signed with Underground, the company that is riding high thanks to client Curry Barker’s box office hit Obsession.
The move comes after the South by Southwest premiere of Phillips’ cosmic horror thriller Imposters, where it landed an early Rotten Tomatoes critics score of 93 percent out of the fest’s Midnighter section and is generating interest among potential buyers.
Phillips wrote and directed the genre-bending Imposters, which stars Jessica Rothe as a mother desperate to get her baby boy back after he is taken. When she learns of a way to get her son home, her husband (Charlie Barnett) begins to suspect the baby that returned is not actually theirs.
Phillips first made waves with his short Other Side of the Box, which amassed more than 30 million views on YouTube and centered on a couple who is gifted a mysterious box, to disastrous and creepy results. That property feels more relevant than ever in the wake of the outsized success of Kane Parsons’ The Backrooms, which began life as a series of popular YouTube shorts and broke A24 records last weekend.
Phillips followed it up with the mind-bending short Play Me, about a woman who wakes up in a car with no memory and discovers a man tied up in the back, and a voice recorder with a note: “play me.”
For Imposters, Phillips teamed with producers Thomas Bond, Sara Seligman and Joe Bandelli, with Blue Finch Films repping it for global distribution. Its cast also includes Yul Vazquez, Bates Wilder, Luisina Quarleri, Thomas Parobek, Ian Lyons, Taylor Karin, Lee Bennett and Declan Bennett.
Phillips is a Los Angeles Film School grad who broke into the directing business while working as a crewmember on numerous projects.
Manager Aaron Folbe and Underground principal Trevor Engelson will rep the filmmaker.
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