Chloë Grace Moretz ( Kickass ) plays a female WWII pilot on a secret mission who must contend with an evil gremlin attempting to dismantle her B-17 in mid-air in Shadow in the Cloud , a horror/action film that debuted at the Toronto International's Film Festival in September, and is now coming to VOD on New Year's Day.  Based on the trailer, it looks like a mashup of Gremlins meets Snakes on a Plane , with some over-the-top Vin Diesel-style action tossed in for good measure.

Set in 1943, the film had a somewhat rocky road on the way to completion. Max Landis —creator of the BBC's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency , based on the Douglas Adams novels, and son of Director John Landis—penned the original draft script, and relative newcomer Roseanne Liang was hired to direct. Then Landis was accused of sexual and emotional abuse by eight women and dropped from the project. (In a since-deleted tweet , Director Josh Trank, who worked with Landis on the 2012 low budget superhero movie, Chronicle , said he believed the accusations and had even banned Landis from the set during Chronicle 's principal photography.)

Liang overhauled the script herself, punching up the female empowerment angle while still maintaining the horror/action thriller sensibility. The film premiered at a Toronto drive-in, and proved hugely popular with festival attendees, even winning the People's Choice Award for Midnight Madness. (It already holds a 74 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.) All that buzz led to a distribution deal with Vertical Entertainment and Redbox Entertainment, purportedly worth about $5 million—apparently the first "drive-in theater movie" to be so acquired, per Deadline Hollywood .