Panos Cosmatos’ Flesh of the Gods adds Esmé Creed-Miles, Roland Møller & Alba Baptista in A24 vampire film. Andrew Kevin Walker wrote it. Here’s what that means
Kristen Stewart and Wagner Moura are already on the ground in the Canary Islands. The cameras are rolling. And Panos Cosmatos — the director who turned Nicolas Cage into a grief-soaked chainsaw myth in Mandy — is back with a vampire film set in 1980s Los Angeles, written by Andrew Kevin Walker, the man who put a severed head in a box and made it feel inevitable.
That combination of elements does not happen by accident.
Flesh of the Gods announced at Cannes this week that Esmé Creed-Miles, Roland Møller, and Alba Baptista have joined the already-announced leads. A24 holds domestic rights. XYZ Films is working the international market as you read this.
The Cast Is Doing Real Work Here
Stewart plays Raoul. Moura plays Alex. They are a married couple in glittering 80s LA who descend nightly from a luxury skyscraper and walk into something they probably should have avoided. The newly added Creed-Miles plays the Nameless — the enigmatic figure whose hard-partying crew pulls Raoul and Alex into what the production describes as “a glamorous, surrealistic world of hedonism, thrills and violence.”
That description could apply to roughly half the actual 1980s Los Angeles social scene, which suggests Cosmatos is either working from research or memory.
Creed-Miles is having a moment. She wraps Flesh of the Gods while simultaneously heading into Georgia Oakley’s Sense and Sensibility opposite Daisy Edgar-Jones for Focus Features, and she just finished Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s A Head Full of Ghosts opposite Rebecca Hall for Lionsgate. She also appeared in Stewart’s own directorial debut, The Chronology of Water — which makes her casting here feel less like coincidence and more like a working relationship being deepened.
Roland Møller, best known internationally for the Oscar-nominated Danish war drama Land of Mine — brings a quiet, credible menace to ensemble genre work. His presence in Atomic Blonde and Riders of Justice confirms he understands how to operate inside heightened worlds without tipping into parody. Alba Baptista, currently filming Amazon’s Voltron opposite Henry Cavill, rounds out a cast that is notably light on vanity and heavy on craft.
Walker’s Script Is the Detail the Trade Coverage Is Burying
Andrew Kevin Walker wrote Se7en. That credit is mentioned in passing in most of the Cannes coverage this week, which is a journalistic error worth correcting.
Walker’s screenplay for David Fincher’s 1995 film didn’t just introduce a villain — it constructed a moral universe in which the villain had a coherent, internally consistent philosophy and won. The script’s willingness to let darkness land without redemptive cushioning is precisely the quality a Cosmatos vampire film requires.
Cosmatos and Walker developed the story together. The screenplay is Walker’s. That is not a hired-gun arrangement — it is a genuine creative alignment between a director who builds mythological nightmare-worlds and a writer who understands that horror lands hardest when it has a point of view.
Whether the result earns that pedigree is a question the Canary Islands shoot is currently answering.
The Setting Is Not Decorative
The 1980s Los Angeles of Flesh of the Gods is not nostalgia. It is a specific social ecosystem: wealth, excess, beautiful people descending from towers into the night — that maps cleanly onto vampire mythology without requiring the film to explain itself. The genre has earned that setting. The Lost Boys established it. Near Dark complicated it. Cosmatos is working in a tradition with teeth, and the casting of Stewart and Moura suggests the film understands that its leads need to carry glamour and unease simultaneously. Both are capable of that.
Production splits between the Canary Islands and Cologne, Germany — an unusual pairing that almost certainly serves the film’s aesthetic rather than its budget.
Where This Goes
A24 holds domestic. XYZ handles international sales and is actively dealmaking at Cannes. Hyperobject Industries, Augenschein Filmproduktion, Nevermind Pictures, and XYZ Films are producing, with XYZ and YouRoc financing alongside IPR.VC and Vixens.
Flesh of the Gods is the fourth collaboration between Cosmatos and XYZ. Their previous projects together include Something Beautiful, the Miley Cyrus film that premiered at Tribeca, and Nekrokosm, currently in development with A24.
A24 distributing a Panos Cosmatos vampire film written by Andrew Kevin Walker is not a minor announcement. It is a specific alignment of talent, material, and platform that either becomes a genuine cultural event or a very expensive proof of concept. Cannes is where the money is placed. The Canary Islands is where the bet is being made.
