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This morning the lovely folks at First Look Studios have provided us with an exclusive that will have you wishing that you’d skipped breakfast. We’ve got a new clip and a gallery of new photos from The Donner Party, which stars Crispin Glover. It made its debut here in Austin at the Austin Film Festival this past year, where Slackerwood‘s Jenn Brown said that even though this story of California-bound settlers turned cannibals would work as a horror film, “the historic event gets a well deserved dramatic approach that makes it all the more unsettling.”

Based on the harrowing true story, The Donner Party picks up after William Hastings steers a group, nicknamed “Forlorn Hope,” off course by promising a shorter route to California through the Sierra Nevada Mountains. After several early snowstorms, the group and its leaders, William Foster (Crispin Glover, Alive in Wonderland, Beowulf) and William Eddy (Clayne Crawford, “24,” “CSI”), find themselves lost, freezing and without any source of food. The threat of death and imminent starvation dissolves the group’s camaraderie as they are forced sacrifice one another as a source of nourishment. Surviving only on the flesh of the fallen members of their party, the remaining travelers must weigh their consciences against their will to survive.

The Donner Party is on DVD January 26, 2010.

Here is a new non-exclusive clip, in which a man must find a way to feed his daughters:

And finally, our exclusive photo gallery: