Beware! Elijah Wood Wants To Give You His Cooties [Video]

[Warning: This article may contain spoilers for the film Cooties.]

“Circle, circle. Square, square. Now you have it everywhere.”

Cooties. We know what they are. We grew up hearing about them, so it seems long overdue that we finally have the quintessential Cooties movie. Cooties, starring Elijah Wood (Maniac, The Lord of the Rings) and co-starring Rainn Wilson (The Office) and Alison Pill (The Newsroom) is a new horror-comedy and, coming from the minds of the co-creator of Saw and Insidious, Leigh Whannell and Glee‘s co-creator, Ian Brennan, it should come as no surprise that Cooties successfully blends sight gags with the grotesque.

Elijah Wood leads a group of his fellow teachers in a fight to make it through the day without falling prey to Cooties, while also coping with an unconventional love triangle. Also, Cooties takes place on a Monday. Could it get any worse?

The Cooties trailer below, newly released from Lionsgate, is followed by the official plot summary.

https://youtu.be/2l0dbvkCV5w

“Cooties is a horror comedy with unexpected laughs and unapologetic thrills. When a cafeteria food virus turns elementary school children into killer savages, a group of misfit teachers must band together to escape the playground carnage.”

In the strictest sense, Cooties is not a zombie flick, per se. However, the children infected with cooties begin to decompose and develop a craving for the taste of human flesh. Like they say, if it looks like a duck, well, you know.

“Cooties—which is quite silly—has, we hope, some provocative themes in it about teachers being underpaid and under-appreciated, the processed food being given to our children in schools, [and] over-medicating kids,” producer Daniel Noah said of the film. “I just made it sound like Al Gore’s new documentary!”

Cooties comes from SpectreVision, a fledgling company co-founded by Elijah Wood, Daniel Noah, and Josh C. Waller. As a newly formed entity, SpectreVision was looking for original projects that would help to set them apart from the competition. Elijah Wood explains that it was this hope to bring something new to the table that led the three-man team to developing the idea for Cooties.

“It [the idea for Cooties] came from Josh. We’d bounced around this thing for a while—and we wanted to make a serious movie, that’s the really funny thing. We wanted to make it this very serious movie about killer children. Ultimately, we found out that Leigh was interested [in writing it]. He was the one who was like, ‘It’s called Cooties, it should be a comedy.’ “

Cooties hits theaters on September 18.

[Featured image: courtesy of SpectreVision/Cooties]