Elijah Wood’s production company SpectreVision has announced its latest project at Sundance today and it is probably not what you would expect from the star of The Lord of the Rings series. His latest is a horror film simply titled, The Boy.
The Boy would be the first installation of a proposed trilogy that will track the upbringing of a future serial killer. The films will “explore the killer at the ages of 9, 14, and 18, culminating with him becoming an iconic mass murderer.” The film is based on the short film Henley, directed by Craig McNeill, which premiered at last year’s Sundance Film Festival. Clay McLeod Chapman, who came up with the characters in his novel, Miss Corpus, is penning the script.
Eight-year old actor Jared Breeze will play the lead role of Henley. The child actor is in another of SpectreVision’s production, Cooties, which premieres on Sunday at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.
Producer Daniel Noah had this to say about the young actor, “…he made a huge impression on the set. The Boy is a very different kind of child-horror film. It’s a probing character study into the undeveloped mind of a future madman. Jared’s tender complexity is just right to bring us into the life of this complicated young person,” he added.
Hollywood has gotten a lot of flak recently for its depictions of violence influencing children. One has to wonder if this concept may become too controversial to get off the ground. Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin covered similar territory, and short of the critical attention that it received, the film was released on very few screens. Without even a Tilda Swinton attached to the project, it looks like The Boy has an long road ahead.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
