“I didn’t really know what we were going to be seeing,” Osgood Perkins admits live on stage after 30 minutes of his new movie Keeper were screened to a select group in New York and Los Angeles earlier this week. The fans and journalists in attendance had even less of an idea of what they were about to see, which has become the norm for an Osgood Perkins picture.

Perkins, the son of the late legend Anthony Perkins, keeps his artistic instrument clear, allowing no distractions to seep their way into his creative process. His instrument? His mind.

“If you’re going to be putting out, you’ve got to be putting in. It’s like eating well. Drinking less. You’re really cognizant about what you’re ingesting,” Perkins explains. “I try not to put a bunch of junk into my system. I don’t watch Netflix, I don’t have Netflix. Netflix is the opposite of what I do. I don’t watch bad movies. I don’t watch a lot of horror movies. I don’t really like them. I don’t really watch them. I read a lot. I play with my kids. I listen to music. I go to coffee shops and I watch people. That’s how I feed myself. I go to the museum. I read poems. I read comic books. And I try not to watch the news. I don’t have any social media. It’s taking care of your instrument. If I’m the vessel that the stuff pours through, I might as well keep it fairly clean.”

It’s a process that’s clearly working for Osgood Perkins.

Perkins was 41 when he made his first movie, The Blackcoat’s Daughter in 2015, and in the past few years alone he’s made a huge impact at the box office with Longlegs starring Nicolas Cage last year and Stephen King adaptation The Monkey this year, both of which are being followed by sixth movie Keeper this November, his third collaboration with distributor NEON.

And that brings us back to the quote we opened this piece with. “I didn’t really know what we were going to be seeing.” It’s the way everyone in those NY and LA sneak peeks felt, and that’s part of a carefully curated mystique that NEON and Perkins began playing with on the road to the release of Longlegs last year. Perkins’ first collaboration with NEON was shrouded in secrecy to the point that we never even got a look at Nicolas Cage’s bone chilling character until we bought our ticket and sat down in the theater to watch the movie, with the marketing campaign largely driven by cryptic teases and a mysterious viral website. It was a plan that clearly paid off big time, with Longlegs scaring up $127 million at the box office.

If The Blackcoat’s Daughter established Perkins as a filmmaker to watch among the hardcore, deeply online horror fanbase, it was Longlegs that crossed Perkins over into the mainstream. The success of that film not only made Perkins a bona fide big screen horror filmmaker, but it also clearly set a tone for his future output: you never know what you’re going to get from an Osgood Perkins picture, but you should probably buy that ticket and show the hell up.

WARNING: If you want to know NOTHING about Keeperturn away now…

So what did we see when we sat down to watch the exclusive sneak peek at Keepera film that has been wrapped up as secretly as Longlegs was last year? NEON treated us to a total of 30 minutes of the film that were clearly pulled from four or five different chronologically-selected scenes, the first vignette introducing the main players: Tatiana Maslany's Liz and Rossif Sutherland’s Malcolm. A romantic date is interrupted by the arrival of obnoxious cousin Darren and his new girlfriend, Minka. Things take a turn for the strange when Malcolm and his cousin exit the room, leaving Liz to share an awkward moment with Minka. “Tastes like shit,” Minka randomly tells Liz, motioning towards a neatly wrapped package sitting on the kitchen counter.

Obnoxious cousin and his girlfriend exit as quickly as they arrived, leaving Liz that much more appreciative of the man she’s clearly falling in love with. But what about that bizarre exchange? And what is that mysterious gift on the counter? It hangs heavy over the scene until it’s finally addressed again, with Malcolm opening it up after a quick make-out session.

It’s a chocolate cake, one that was baked by the caretaker of the cabin they’re staying in. Liz reluctantly takes a couple bites – she’s never been a fan of chocolate cake – and she offers up a wry review to Malcolm, who is eagerly awaiting her feedback: “Tastes like shit.”

The next scene jumps to later that night. Liz wakes up after experiencing strange dreams. Was that someone pointing a gun at her bloodied head? And is someone… or something… in the bedroom with them? Before we can process any of the haunting imagery, Liz heads into the kitchen to find that chocolate cake still sitting there. A bright red cherry on top. Missing only the slice that she consumed. She’s almost supernaturally drawn to the cake, tearing away at it with her fingers and voraciously devouring it. The suggestion is clearly that this isn’t a normal cake and that eating it has changed Liz in some way. Was Minka trying to warn her… ?

The indelible imagery of an Osgood Perkins movie is on full display in the brief scene that was shown next, which finds Liz alone in the cabin. She’s seemingly being stalked by a meat cleaver-wielding man, but it’s hard to tell what’s going on without any context. Something about someone unnaturally walking around the cabin with its head barely attached? It feels like something out of a Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark book. We’ll leave it at that.

Much more is revealed in the final scenes that NEON showed, but to talk too much about them would be delving a bit too far into spoiler territory. All we’ll say is that there’s a strong fairy tale-mythology at play here, something Perkins previously played with in his movie Gretel & Hansela fresh new take on the classic tale. A dark forest. Promises of eternal life.

Creatures? Very hungry creatures?

Before you know it, seemingly inhuman entities are crawling all over the cabin, and Liz is plunged into a survival nightmare. We have no idea exactly what the threat here is, but it’s clear that Liz and Malcolm are in a fight for their lives. The final lines spoken by Maslany in the final moments of the footage we were shown capture it all pitch perfectly: “What the fuck?”

Osgood Perkins. He’s a Keeper.

The latest dark trip from Osgood Perkins opens in theaters on November 14.