Passenger Trailer & Release Date Out: When Will The Movie Release In India? Details Inside

130 million people take road trips every year. 15,400 of them are never seen again. What if the road itself was never safe? That's the question at the heart of Passenger, the upcoming horror film from Paramount Pictures that reimagines the haunted highway as something far more ancient, far more malevolent, and far more inescapable.

Passenger marks the creative union of two genre heavyweights: American screenwriter Zachary Donohue, known for the 2013 horror title The Den, and British horror writer T.W. Burgess, whose acclaimed body of work includes graphic novels, comics, and stories such as Malevolent and Early Haunts. The two were long-time admirers of each other before chance, and countless video calls brought them together.

"We had a mutual affinity for each other's work", says Donohue. "Plus, Thom is from England, so stories of hauntings are in his genes." Those conversations, rooted in a shared love of horror, eventually revealed that both writers had independently been developing ideas for a haunted road movie. Rather than pursue them separately, they chose to merge their visions into something singular.

The haunted highway is a well-worn trope across world cinema, but Donohue and Burgess found themselves drawn to a gap in the genre. "We both had affinity for films like The Hitcher," Burgess notes. "But we began to wonder, why has no one done something which was supernatural-based?"

Donohue elaborates on the ambition behind their approach, "Usually these haunted road stories are about someone who died on that road and is now haunting it - about a specific haunted road. We wanted to make it broader, something scarier, and just demonic. Where every road is haunted, and they've always been haunted."

The result is a film that takes the everyday anxieties of driving, getting lost, losing track of time, a flat tyre on a dark stretch of highway, and reframes them as something deeply sinister. "We wanted to do something totally different," Burgess says. "It's not just a ghost of a road, but something more malevolent and more all-encompassing. So what does that look like?" They began exploring the typical things that might plague drivers, like becoming lost, losing a sense of time - even flat tires - and asking themselves, 'What might that look like as a scare?'

Watch trailer here:

After a young couple witnesses a gruesome highway accident, they soon realise they did not leave the crash scene alone, as a demonic presence called the Passenger that won't stop until it claims them both turns their van life adventure into a nightmare.

Directed by André Øvredal, the film features Jacob Scipio, Lou Llobell, and Melissa Leo.

Paramount Pictures will be releasing Passenger in Indian Cinemas on 29th May 2026.