You’re going to be seeing a lot of Mason Gooding this year. The Scream actor will face the Ghostface again this month in Scream 7, and also has a funny role in Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex. But there’s also a new horror on the horizon that Gooding will lead, The Gates, which marks the final feature film of the late James Van Der Beek.
Written and directed by Muse filmmaker John Burr, The Gates also stars Euphoria‘s Algee Smith and The Tomorrow War actor Keith Powers.
Here’s the synopsis: The Gates is Burr’s second feature, following his debut, the supernatural thriller Muse. The Gates follows three college students — Derek, Kevin, and Tyon (Gooding, Smith, and Powers) on a road trip gone wrong, as the three young men take an ill-advised shortcut through a remote gated community, where they find themselves trapped behind the walls after witnessing a murder. Over the course of the night, they find themselves blamed, hunted, and fractured by their own differing belief systems, while the perpetrator—James Van Der Beek, at his most charming and terrifying—emerges as the cunning patriarch that holds the entire community under his influence.
It almost sounds like a Judgement Night-type survival thriller, which could be pretty cool.
As I mentioned, The Gates is the final role of James Van Der Beek, who passed away of cancer last week. Burr issued a statement (via Collider) on how much it meant getting a chance to work with him…
“Even though he is no longer with us, his energy somehow feels like it lives on, bringing us all back together again, inspiring us to live life the way he did. I am grateful for that. And so, on behalf of the entire filmmaking team, I’d like to express our heartbreak at James’ passing, and our joy to have been so lucky to know him.”
Lionsgate will release The Gates into select theaters on March 13th.
