The end of addiction, begins with a chase.
A few years back, filmmaker Johnny Hickey brought the OxyContin epidemic to America’s attention with Oxy-Morons. Based on his life, trials, and near-death experiences in the nascent throes of the opioid crisis, the film was a gut-wrenching wakeup call to anybody who at that point hadn’t come to understand the dangers of prescription painkillers.
For his second feature film, Habitual, which is planned for release this coming fall, Hickey kept the theme in his macabre wheelhouse, but also dove much deeper into horror territory in order to capture the nightmare of the current fentanyl scourge.
In the film, "A fistful of drug popping ravers swallow what leads to a hell bent trip to 'The Habit,' an underground rave party, being held at an abandoned lunatic asylum in Salem Massachusetts. Plans to party all night drastically morph into chaotic hallucinations of the rave being buried deeper and deeper within a mind bending structure of massive abandonment. Decrepit walls and stairwells built to keep insanity captive, separate the group into a spiral of horrifying paradoxes, splicing nightmares into reality. In the end, one person's insanity is the others reality."
Anti-drug bona fides aside, Habitual is no after-school special, as Hickey lets us know that the movie is a bloodbath highlighted with intense special effects and some seriously horrifying backdrops.
Habitual was filmed at the abandoned Westborough State Hospital (once known as the Westborough Insane Hospital), as well as in a comparably creepy building for housing the criminally insane on the grounds of Tewksbury State Hospital in New England.
To fill those settings, Hickey said he "brought in a group of characters who were believable, not a stereotypical group of kids who get killed in a horror movie," including MTV's "The Challenge" star Chris "C.T." Tamburello, Emilee Fitzpatrick, Anthony Hoang, Sabrina Kennedy and Jaylee Hickey.
The film is produced by Thomas Walton (Room 9).
Check out the official trailer and poster art for Habitual below.
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