Dorothy: The Haunting of Oz has its first teaser trailer and poster, and the yellow brick road now leads through a Northern California campus on Halloween night.
What Dorothy: The Haunting of Oz is about
The official synopsis has a viral Halloween challenge unleashing the Wicked Witch of the West and Dorothy on a college town, where a group of basketball players is already dealing with grief, shattered dreams, and injuries that threaten to end their athletic futures.
Melanie, a young woman carrying heartbreak and childhood wounds, gets pulled into the middle of the haunting. The internet trend turns into a waking nightmare; memory, fear, myth, and the supernatural stop being separate things. As the curse spreads, Melanie has to confront the pain she has spent her life outrunning before it consumes everyone around her.
Adrienne Tabag, Caia Bonner, Jordan Sklansky, Aziah King, Andrew Wang and Thomas Shan star. The film marks the feature debut of 22-year-old writer-director Elijah J. Alvarez, who also produces through his company Buddy Pictures. It pulls from L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel, now in the public domain, and Bloody Disgusting’s exclusive first look last November described it as a mix of psychological thriller, supernatural slasher, coming of age, and science fiction.
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Alvarez on grief, the internet, and living with the monster
Alvarez said that:
This movie is about my generation, how Gen Z is fractured by the internet and still trying to find ourselves while life keeps stripping pieces away.
“We document everything, we chase feeling, and still we can’t stop the darkness from arriving. I took inspiration from George Lucas and the way he made American Graffiti, telling stories about the youth of his era in his own voice.“
He put the themes plainly.
At its core, Dorothy: The Haunting of Oz is about grief-shaped identity, the ways evil enters through the fractures in our lives, and what happens when the thing haunting us is also the part of ourselves we refuse to face.
“For me, horror is a powerful way to explore not just defeating the monster, but learning how to live with it.“
The film is in post-production and targeting a fall 2026 premiere. Alvarez previously cited Get Out and Sinners as influences on the project.