Flash back to 2009, 30 Days of Night and Hard Candy director David Slade was attached to helm the adaptation of the Antarctic island horror/psychological thriller Cold Skin, based on a best-selling Spanish novel of the same title.
Then, in 2011, Xavier Gens (The Divide, Hitman, Frontiere(s)) was attached to take the reigns from a screenplay by Carriers writers Alex and David Pastor.
After years in development hell, filming is officially underway, which means Cold Skin is actually, finally, truly happening!
Who stars? Ray Stevenson (“Dexter,” Punisher, Big Game, Thor, the Divergent franchise) and David Oakes (The Borgias, The White Queen), says Variety.
Based on a best-seller of the same title by Albert Sanchez Piñol whose adaptation rights were said to have been pursued in their day by Focus Europe and Filmax, Cold Skin begins with a young man approaching a remote island on the edge of the Antarctic Circle to relieve a weather observer who has been stationed there in solitude. But all he finds is a deranged castaway who has witnessed a horror he refuses to name.
Cold Skin co-stars Spain’s double-Goya nominee Aura Garrido (Stockholm, The Department of Time).
Two-time Academy Award winner Gil Parrondo serves as production designer: award-winning Ranchito (“Games of Thrones,” The Impossible) supplies VFX.
Principal photography will move to the Canary Islands later this month and then a further part of the shoot is planned for Iceland exteriors, said Babieka’s Denis Pedregosa.
Here’s the synopsis from a few years back:
“In this grim, H.G. Wellsian fable, an unnamed European of unspecified nationality is hired to spend an unspecified mid-20th-century year logging wind conditions on a tiny Antarctic island. Anticipating solitude, the bookish young man soon discovers that he has a neighbor–the pathologically reclusive Gruner–and that each night, the island is overrun by humanoid killer amphibians. He and brutish Gruner–who has tamed a “toad” of his own–join forces, killing monsters by night and fornicating with Gruner’s pet by day. Inspired by the creature’s ability to laugh and cry–to say nothing of her perky breasts, knack for housework and wordless submissiveness–the narrator begins to think of the cold-blooded creatures as human. When he tries to befriend them and their children, his efforts pacify the humanoids, but not Gruner; the hopeful idyll ends when the older man launches a last suicidal effort to exterminate the “monsters.” Gruner’s death plunges our hero into a rut of battle, drunkenness and bestiality so complete that when his replacement arrives, he has become as feral as Gruner was before him.”
It sounds very Lovecraftian, like The Fog meets Dagon…
