The official trailer for Key of Bones: Curse of the Ghost Pirate is out.
Key West runs dozens of ghost tours every night. This is not a promotional claim, it is just a fact about Key West. The island has a documented, operational, financially stable relationship with the supernatural. It is therefore not surprising that someone decided to set a horror-comedy there. It is slightly more surprising that the company that employs me decided to produce it.
The official trailer for Key of Bones: Curse of the Ghost Pirate is out. The film is real. I have watched the trailer to confirm this. iHorror, the horror media website where I have spent years reviewing other people’s films, now has a movie trailer. Both of those sentences remain equally strange to me and I do not expect that to change.
What the Trailer Reveals
The footage looks like Key West specifically, which sounds like the minimum requirement and is genuinely harder to fake than most productions bother attempting. Right light, right streets, the specific texture of a place that has been either deeply haunted or very good at marketing itself as deeply haunted for about two hundred years.
A local waitress, a ghost tour guide, and a tourist accidentally wake up the curse of Anne Bonny. Things escalate the way these things tend to escalate. Ghosts, paranormal chaos, mayhem spreading across an island that was already running three ghost tours simultaneously before any of this started. The horror and the comedy are happening at the same time rather than taking turns, which is how horror comedy works when it works. The film does not appear embarrassed about being a ghost pirate movie. I respect that.
What We Know About Key of Bones
Key of Bones: Curse of the Ghost Pirate was written and directed by Tony Armer, an accomplished film executive and industry leader. Armer co-founded the Sunscreen Film Festival, now celebrating more than two decades of championing independent cinema, and currently serves as Vice President of Film USA. He previously held the role of Film Commissioner for both Dallas and the St. Petersburg-Clearwater region and has produced multiple theatrically distributed feature films.
Armer’s connection to the Florida Keys extends far beyond filmmaking. He lived in Marathon while working his way through college and has remained closely connected to the region ever since, regularly attending and supporting the Key West Film Festival. His deep appreciation for the Keys’ history, culture, and folklore helped inspire the world of Key of Bones.
Cinematography for the film is by Brandon D. Hyde.
Gina Vitori plays Mary Read, from The Salem Chronicles, Monster, and Ahsoka. Melissa Chick plays Anne Bonny, coming off Landman and Lioness on Paramount+. Jeremy King plays Christie, whose credits include the Shudder Scare Package franchise, Apple TV+’s Bad Monkey, and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, which makes him the most professionally prepared person on set for a pirate related emergency. The full cast also includes Chad Newman, Benjamin Healy, Ty Spann, Kitty Clements, and Vincent De Paul.
Anne Bonny and Mary Read were real pirates. Both sailed with Calico Jack in the Caribbean and were captured together in 1720. They are among the most documented female pirates on record. The film is not inventing the mythology. It is asking what the historical version of Anne Bonny left behind, which is a better starting point than most horror premises get. The production shot entirely on location in Key West beginning January 2026. The production has noted this is the first full-length feature filmed entirely in Key West in over 20 years. Key of Bones screened at the Fantastic Pavilion Gala during Marche du Film at Cannes in May 2026.
Why This Matters
Anthony Pernicka built iHorror on a simple idea, horror should be covered by people who genuinely care about the genre. For more than a decade, that meant articles, interviews, reviews, and the annual iHorror Awards. Now it means a movie. Pernicka is producing Key of Bones alongside Cameron Brumbelow, Chuck Ardezzone, and Mark Pulaski, with executive producers Steve Demmler, Mark Rankin, Dr. Robert Nucci, Dr. Robert Catana, and Laurie Criego. It’s a strange and exciting evolution for a company that has spent years asking whether other people’s horror movies work. This time, the company has skin in the game.
I have covered a lot of horror for this site. The job involves having opinions about what good horror looks like and then putting those opinions in front of an audience. Key of Bones is the first time those opinions were made into something with a budget and a release window attached. For readers who have been following iHorror’s coverage for years, this is the part where we find out whether we know what we are talking about. The trailer suggests we might. I am choosing to feel good about that for now.
Most weeks at iHorror, I write about someone else’s film. This is the other kind of week. The trailer is out, the Cannes screening happened, and the horror media outlet I work for has produced a movie about ghost pirates in Key West.
I am genuinely still working on making that sentence feel normal. I do not think it is going to happen.
Most websites celebrate anniversaries with redesigns. iHorror apparently celebrated by making a pirate movie.
Visit keyofbonesmovie.com for more.
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