2011
05.15

GemmaArterton-Slutty

Gemma Arterton (Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters) and Saoirse Ronan (Hanna) are set to star in Oscar winning director Neil Jordan’s (Interview with the Vampire) new vampire frightener Byzantium. Written by Jane Eyre scribe Moira Buffini, the film details the lives of a mother/daughter bloodsucking team.

Producer Stephen Woolley tells THR:

I love the horror genre and we’ve been working on this for three or four years. I sent it to Neil and he liked the script.

Woolley and Jordan’s previous collaborations include In the Company of Wolves, The Butcher Boy, In Dreams, and Interview with the Vampire. Jordan also directed last year’s fantasy-romance Ondine, starring sexy Polish actress Alicja Bachleda as a selkie and Colin Farrell as the fisherman who captures her.

Horror fans last got an eyeful of Arterton’s talents in Anchor Bay’s abduction-thriller The Disappearance of Alice Creed. The 25-year-old stunner is currently at work on Tommy Wirkola’s Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters in Braunschweig, Germany.

Saoirse Ronan

Saoirse Ronan

Ronan, who played the lead in Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones, is coming off director Joe Wright’s teen-assassin actioner Hanna and will next star in Inferno Entertainment’s big screen adaptation of author Stephenie Meyer’s (“Twilight Saga”) bestselling novel “The Host.”

Byzantium is budgeted at $11 million and is expected to go into production in October.

2011
05.15

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Dimension Films and Miramax have tapped filmmakers Casey La Scala and Daniel Farrands to write and direct the recently greenlit sequel The Amityville Horror: The Lost Tapes. The film will pick up where the original 1979 haunted house thriller left off via found footage dating back to 1976.

The film’s synopsis reads:

An ambitious female television news intern, on the verge of breaking the most famous haunted house case in the world, leads a team of journalists, clergymen and paranormal researchers into an investigation of the bizarre events that will come to be known as The Amityville Horror … only to unwittingly open a door to the unreal that she may never be able to close.

Dimension Films distributed Platinum Dunes remake of The Amityville Horror in 2005. The film, which starred Ryan Reynolds, Melissa George, Chloe Moretz, and Rachel Nichols, went on the earn over $109 million in worldwide gross.

The Amityville Horror: The Lost Tapes is slated for release on Jan. 27, 2012.

2011
05.15

Gemma Arterton Moves Into Agatha Christie’s ‘The Crooked House’

Gemma-Arterton-leggy

British actress Gemma Arterton (Disappearance of Alice Creed) is set to star in director Neil LaBute’s big screen adaptation of Agatha Christie’s murder-mystery novel “The Crooked House.” She joins a cast that includes Gabriel Byrne (End of Days), Matthew Goode (Watchmen), and Julie Andrews (The Sound of Music).

LaBute tells Variety:

The story has a couple of fresh sides to it that I didn’t remember from Christie’s work. There’s a love story, which didn’t feature strongly in many of her books, so that seemed very different to me and fresh. Plus it’s quite morally ambiguous, which also appealed to me.

Budgeted at $20 million, The Crooked House is a who-done-it centering on three generations of the Leonides family and the suspicious murder of their multimillionaire patriarch. The clan live together in a huge—and seemingly crooked—mansion.

LaBute, who wrote and directed the delightfully caustic dramas In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, is this time working of a script from The Tourist scribe Julian Fellowes and Tim Rose Price. The film is slated for production in the U.K. this summer.

Arterton is currently shooting Tommy Wirkola’s Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters in Braunschweig, Germany.