Pascal Plante is becoming Canada's most interesting genre filmmaker, and King's Daughters looks like his boldest swing yet.
The Red Rooms director is tackling 1663 colonial history through a folk-horror lens, following the "cursed transatlantic voyage" of orphan girls sent by King Louis XIV to marry settlers in New France. It's a real historical program—the Filles du Roi—that's ripe for sinister reinterpretation.
First images show period-accurate costumes and the kind of oppressive atmosphere that made The Witch work. Plante's previous film, Red Rooms, was a chilly psychological thriller about dark web murder trials. He clearly has a gift for dread, and applying that sensibility to colonial horror is inspired.
Folk horror thrives when it roots supernatural terror in historical trauma. The Witch did it with Puritan repression. Midsommar weaponized pagan ritual. King's Daughters has built-in horror: young women shipped across an ocean to become breeding stock for a failing colony, with nowhere to run and no one to trust.
Add the isolation of a ship, the claustrophobia of religious authority, and the existential terror of being property, and you've got a recipe for something genuinely unsettling. Plante doesn't need jump scares when history provides this much nightmare fuel.
The film is still in production, so details are scarce. But Plante's track record suggests he'll treat the material with the seriousness it deserves. Colonial horror works best when it doesn't flinch from the real horrors of colonialism—the systematic dehumanization, the commodification of bodies, the way empires grind up lives and call it progress.
If Plante can pull that off while delivering the genre goods, King's Daughters could be 2027's breakout horror film. Folk horror is having a moment, and filmmakers who understand how to blend history with supernatural terror are cashing in.
