A small child in a rain jacket digs in a sandbox with a plastic bucket and a toy rake, and for a few seconds the first teaser for “Crossed” could pass for a quiet film about a gray, wet afternoon. A few cuts later, a man walks up behind the kid with a sledgehammer lifted over his shoulder, and that image tells you, before a word of credit appears, what Rob Jabbaz has made from Garth Ennis’s most notorious comic. The teaser went up on Thursday, October 8th, as an exclusive on Bloody Disgusting’s YouTube channel, where it sits behind an age restriction. It runs barely a minute, which turns out to be more than enough.
Ennis, who co-created “The Boys” and “Preacher” on the page, wrote the screenplay himself, adapting the original ten issues he made with artist Jacen Burrows at Avatar Press, where “Crossed” debuted in 2008. Jabbaz directed “The Sadness,” the 2021 Taiwanese outbreak film that both Bloody Disgusting and Fangoria point out was inspired by “Crossed” in the first place, so this pairing feels less like a studio match and more like a debt finally being paid back. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Crossed” and its first teaser trailer.
Jabbaz directed “The Sadness,” the 2021 Taiwanese outbreak film that both Bloody Disgusting and Fangoria point out was inspired by “Crossed” in the first place, so this pairing feels less like a studio match and more like a debt finally being paid back.”
The premise is the comic’s, more or less intact. A disease marks the faces of the infected with a cross and strips away every restraint they had. As Bloody Disgusting puts it, they behave like zombies “without losing intellect,” and that is the whole horror of the thing, because the Crossed are not hungry, they are cruel, and they know exactly what they are doing. Stan (Devin Druid) and Cindy (Ash Santos) lead a group of strangers thrown together as they try to escape north, away from the infected. Druid comes from “13 Reasons Why” and Santos from “American Horror Story.” On the other side, Owen Harn of “Cobra Kai” plays the infected villain Horsecock, alongside Fedor Steer as Face and Kelvin Adekunle as Stump. Gizmodo and Screen Rant both list a wider ensemble that includes Ethan Jones Romero, Kyla Hee, Chido Nwokocha, Spenser Granese, Bob Morley, Ana Mulvoy-Ten, Steven Hack and Lorenzo Ross. The teaser does not stop to introduce any of them.
What the footage does instead is build a very ordinary morning and then break it. After the sandbox, the camera looks through a chain-link fence at a figure holding an umbrella, the child small and far off in the sand to the left, while a hand presses toward the lens in the foreground. Then it cuts to a diner, where a hand scrolls a phone beside a coffee cup and a half-eaten plate, and a young man in glasses, who looks to be Druid’s Stan, sits at the counter with the phone in his hand. A woman and a young boy stand in the aisle behind him, both staring at something we never see. Back outside, a hooded child fills the foreground while a blurred shape walks up from behind. A woman in a headband turns to look back over her shoulder, her umbrella still up, and a wide shot finally shows the man raising the sledgehammer over the child. She screams. The trailer cuts away before anything lands, straight to a red card that stacks “FROM GARTH ENNIS” over “CREATOR OF THE BOYS,” which is about as blunt a piece of positioning as you will see this year.
The second movement is night, and it is where the collapse goes public. A cluster of people outside a low building watch a car crash burn in the street, then run along a motel walkway, the young man in glasses among them. The camera settles on a close-up of the curly-haired woman from the diner. Then comes a television, watched by a dark-haired figure in the foreground, and the details on that screen are worth pausing on. A “NEWS 24” broadcast carries an “EXCLUSIVE” banner over a chyron reading “MISSILE EXCHANGE CONTINUES,” and a ticker underneath mentions a four-alarm blaze in downtown Los Angeles. In the middle of it, a man in a suit grabs a bloodied woman on what looks like the news set itself. Whether that missile chyron is set dressing or a hint that the world was already coming apart before the Crossed arrived, the teaser does not say. Expect it to get freeze-framed for weeks. Screen Rant transcribed a voiceover in the teaser saying “It turned out, they were everywhere,” and the same outlet quotes the infection as having “spread like lightning.”
From there the cuts get faster. Running feet slap across wet pavement, a white picket fence flashes past, and the frame blows out to white. A man in a bloodstained shirt swings a club through a window, which leads into the second card, “AND ROB JABBAZ” over “DIRECTOR OF THE SADNESS,” set against shattering glass. Then comes the shot that might be the best in the teaser. Out in thick fog, a pair of headlights sits low in the dark while a figure carrying a long-handled tool walks across the beams. From behind the wheel, we watch that figure stop in the glare and raise the tool high. A side angle shows it standing in the light beside the car, weapon up, and then the screen goes black. What happens to whoever is in the driver’s seat is left entirely to your imagination.
When the picture comes back, time seems to have moved on. Two silhouetted figures carrying packs cross a ridge at dusk, and a skull lies half buried in sand beside a ribcage as a gun barrel noses into the frame. The man in glasses, shot from a low angle against a washed-out sky, is now stubbled and wearing a battered jacket. A still that MovieWeb captioned as “Devin Druid as Stan” is this exact shot, so at least that identification is not a guess. After that the color drains into a red tint over a ruined industrial street, where bodies lie scattered across the ground. If the diner was the first day, this looks like a world that has been living with the Crossed for a long while.
The next few seconds are the stretch the age restriction exists for, so plain description will do. There is a screaming, bloodied face in close-up, a man held in a headlock by a grinning attacker, and a woman screaming with her hair across her face. Figures silhouetted on a rooftop club someone, and a bloodied man pushes his head through a tent flap. Then the survivors return, bent under heavy packs as they climb through dry scrub, with a man and a woman, she in sunglasses, leading the way. A young man in the woods looks upward as his face crumples. Three red cards split up what is left, “NO HEROES,” “NO HOPE” and “NO FUTURE.” Between them, a crowd stands silhouetted on a hill raising rifles and axes with fire behind them, and the man in glasses sights down a rifle with a scarf pulled over his mouth. A woman with a braid walks a dry creek bed with an axe hanging at her side, and the camera pushes into a heavily scarred face. The final images are a woman standing over a pit of bodies between wooden walls, a bloodied man crawling across them, and a grinning blonde woman with a red cross laid over her face like a glitch in the signal. Then comes the title, “CROSSED,” and a last card that reads “NO ONE IS COMING TO SAVE YOU.”
That last line almost matches the teaser poster Comics Beat published alongside the trailer. It puts a bare skull on black, cracked down the middle and across the cheekbones in the shape of a cross, under the slightly different tagline “NO ONE WILL SAVE YOU.” The crew behind all this is stronger than a lot of independent horror gets. Bleeding Cool and Fangoria both list cinematographer Benji Bakshi, who shot “Bone Tomahawk,” along with production designer Freddy Waff, stunt coordinator Steve Brown and editor Greg D’Auria. Six Studios is financing the film, according to Bleeding Cool, and Carl Choi of Six Studios produces with Ben Hung of Retro Entertainment and Ken Levin of Nightsky Productions. Bleeding Cool also lists Ennis among the executive producers. When Jabbaz joined the project, he said, as quoted by ComicBookMovie, “From day one, our primary goal has been to deliver a faithful adaptation of the original series, along with a few new surprises.”
Faithful is a loaded word with this material. Ennis has told the story of where “Crossed” came from before, and Bleeding Cool quoted it again in its trailer story: “I had a dream that I thought was going to be about zombies attacking a house full of victims, but it turned out they weren’t zombies at all. They were simply people, grinning with psychotic glee at the thought of what they were going to do to the occupants of the house, which wasn’t going to be anything nice.” That grin is the series, and it is also the reason the grinning attackers in this teaser land harder than any of the blood does. The comic grew far past those first ten issues, with later runs including “Crossed + One Hundred,” a series Alan Moore originally wrote. Comics Beat notes that this is the first feature written directly by Ennis, though he previously wrote the 2020 “Boys” short film “Butcher.” Whatever lands on screen, the voice of it will be his.
The odd thing is how much the teaser holds back. The sandbox cuts away before the hammer comes down, and the headlight shot cuts to black. Most of the violence arrives in fragments too quick to fully read, which is probably the only way to cut a minute of “Crossed” that a platform will host at all. The Playlist wrote that “this teaser may come across as a little tame” to anyone who does not know the comic, and that is fair, though tame here is relative to one of the most extreme horror books ever published. What it does sell is the tone, and the line between a cruel world and a nihilistic slog is thin. “The Sadness” walked it, and whether a film built on this comic can do the same over feature length is a real open question.
What the teaser does not have is a date. No distributor has been announced, and Comics Beat reports there is no release date, with MovieWeb and Screen Rant saying the same. No rating has been announced either, so for now the only gate on “Crossed” is YouTube’s age check. The Playlist told readers to stay tuned for word on a world premiere location and a theatrical date, and that is about as much as anyone can say. Finding a home for a movie this extreme might take a festival run and a brave buyer, and that search could take a while.
What Do You Think? Does cutting away from the sandbox and the headlights make this teaser scarier than showing everything would have, or does it undersell what “Crossed” readers know is coming? Is that “MISSILE EXCHANGE CONTINUES” chyron a real clue about how the world falls apart, or just texture on a TV screen? And with no distributor attached yet, who do you think has the nerve to put a film this extreme in theaters?
See you on the next binge!
