Bret Easton Ellis is an acclaimed author who has made a living writing about the extremes of the human psyche with tales involving soulless and unsympathetic characters - all of which are a social commentary texts about the modern day man who is lost in a world filled with gratuitous sex, violence, unimportant pop-culture and constant artificiality. If you don't know his name, you will know his works -
American Psycho, Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction.
Variety say the author has been busy writing a screenplay about a cursed high school for a forthcoming horror/thriller which
Hayden Panettiere is set to lead. Oh, I'm intrigued alright... Based on the book by Michael Hornberg,
Downers Grove will revolve around a cursed high school in a small Chicago suburb where every year a senior mysteriously dies in bizarre circumstances. It's 'Final Destination' but only once every 365 days, usually suicides and drunken accidental deaths. It's a cool premise, every school has an Urban Legend and it's been a while since we've had a really good high school/horror - maybe as long as twelve years and Robert Rodriguez's
The Faculty. Has there been any good ones since?
Scream 4 queen Paniettere plays paranoid high schooler Chrissie Swanson (and she has reasons to be paranoid, after beating up a jock who tries to rape her at a party she becomes the victim of his violent hate crime), and also on board are Twilight's
Nikki Reed (as her boy-crazy, sexpot best friend Tracy) and
Rebecca De Mornay (presumably as Chrissie's mother).
The only niggling worry about the project is the man behind the camera
- Nelson McCormick - who has already had a crack at a high school horror/thriller with the ludicrous
Prom Night remake, and is the man responsible for sucking the life out of
The Stepfather redo. However, both those movies were remakes of perfectly fine genre pieces, so hopefully with an unfilmed property he will have less distractions when trying to find his own voice as a filmmaker. Downer's Grove is a Myriad Pictures production and is looking for a distributor at the American Film Market.