Nicolas Winding Refn will next direct LA-set horror story The Neon Demon, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
The Danish film-maker, who plans to recruit a mainly female cast, has spoken about his inspiration for the film. “One morning I woke and realised I was both surrounded and dominated by women. Strangely, a sudden urge was planted in me to make a horror film about vicious beauty,” he said. “After making Drive and falling madly in love with the electricity of Los Angeles, I knew I had to return to tell the story of The Neon Demon.”
It is not clear if The Neon Demon is the same film, albeit with a new title, as the previously announced sex thriller/horror I Walk With the Dead, which in 2011 Winding Refn said would star Drive’s Carey Mulligan and was tipped to feature an all-female cast. The new film will begin shooting early next year in Los Angeles and is being backed by French production companies Gaumont and Wild Bunch. Winding Refn has co-written The Neon Demon, which features the tagline “The wicked die young,” with first-timer Mary Laws, a graduate of Yale’s playwrighting program.
Known for his penchant for on-screen violence, Winding Refn has long held a passion for horror and cites 1974’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as one of his favourite movies. “My parents were brought up on the French New Wave. That was God to them, but to me it was the antichrist, and how better to rebel against your parents than by watching something your mother is going to hate, which were American horror movies,” he said in a 2012 interview. “When I saw Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I realised, I don’t want to be a director, I don’t want to be a writer, I don’t want to be a producer, I don’t want to be a photographer, I don’t want to be an editor, I don’t want to be a sound man. I want to be all of them at once. And that film proved that you can do it because that movie is not a normal movie.”
