Movies
Milla Jovovich to Topline the Very Cool ‘Faces in the Crowd’
Seriously, how can you not love Milla Jovovich? She’s beautiful, talented and dedicated to our genre. While she’s off shooting her fourth Resident Evil film, and Universal is pushing out her freaky doc-styled The Fourth Kind (in theaters November 6), she has now been tapped to topline a really, really effin’ cool sounding thriller entitled Faces in the Crowd. Read all about it inside, scroll to the bottom for a full synopsis and mood reel.
Milla Jovovich will star in writer-director Julien Magnat’s psychological thriller “Faces in the Crowd” for Forecast Pictures, Radar Films and Minds Eye Entertainment.
Scott Mednick (“Where the Wild Things Are”) is producing alongside Jean-Charles Levy, Clement Miserez and Kevin DeWalt.
Sylvain White, who directed “Stomp the Yard,” is also onboard to produce and mentor Magnat, who is making his English-language helming debut with the project, which he also penned.
The story centers on a woman who barely survives an attack by a serial killer and wakes up in hospital with a head injury that leaves her “face-blind.” No longer able to recognize faces, she must navigate a world in which facial features change each time she loses sight of them. All the while the killer is closing in, determined to eliminate the potential witness.
“Julien has written a breathtaking thriller that is truly original, and I was hooked from the first read,” Mednick said of the screenplay that deals with the real-life neurological disorder called prosopagnosia.
Lensing will begin in March. International sales will be handled at next week’s American Film Market by Voltage Pictures.
Jovovich, who toplined the “Resident Evil” franchise, is currently shooting the fourth installment. Her upcoming credits also include the Robert De Niro-Edward Norton starrer “Stone.”
FULL SYNOPSIS:
A serial killer has been terrorizing the city. An innocent bystander witnesses his latest attack, but while fleeing, she falls from a bridge and is knocked unconscious. When she awakes in the hospital, she can’t recognize family, her boyfriend or even her own face in the mirror. She is diagnosed with prosopagnosia, or ‘face blindness’. This is a real neurological disorder, like dyslexia but with faces, caused by a lesion of the temporal lobe, the part of the brain that allows us in a heartbeat to compare someone’s face with all the faces stored in our memory. She is incapable of recognizing the same face twice. Every time she looks at someone, it’s like she’s never met them before. Being the only witness, she is hunted by the killer, leaving her paranoid in a sea of unfamiliar faces. Where can she turn? Who can she trust? Who is she waking up next to? Who is standing next to her? This suspense thriller takes us on a terrifying ride thru the blurry eyes of a woman searching for a monster amongst the faces in the crowd.
Genre fans rejoiced this week as Peacock finally released a teaser trailer for the upcoming Crystal Lake TV series starring Linda Cardellini as horror’s favorite killer mommy. This sneak peek is actually the first footage of an official Friday the 13th project since the Platinum Dunes remake came out over 17 years ago, so it makes sense that we’re all incredibly hyped for this long-awaited prequel.
While we’ve since received more information about the show -including how all eight episodes will be released at the same time on October 15– fans wasted no time in speculating about the direction they think showrunner Brad Caleb Kane intends to take the franchise next. After all, Kane’s team is free to adapt elements from the entire Friday the 13th franchise, so it seems that anything goes at this point. That being said, I doubt we’ll be seeing young Jason depicted as a fun-sized killer with an affinity for hockey masks, as I’m of the opinion that the show is likely reaching back to the original actress behind Pamela Voorhees herself in order to fill out the prequel’s story.
You see, after sifting through behind-the-scenes interviews and plenty of special features from my own Friday the 13th collection on physical media, I learned that the late, great Betsy Palmer had come up with an elaborate backstory for Ms. Voorhees that was never properly explored in the films. She may have only accepted the iconic role because she needed money for a new car, with Palmer notoriously referring to Victor Miller’s original script as a “piece of shit”, but that didn’t stop her from taking her work seriously – and eventually even warming up to the now-iconic film.
Trained in the Stanislavski Method, an infamous system where actors use the “art of experiencing” to more realistically portray their characters, Palmer decided to build off of Miller’s script and make her own notes in order to characterize Pamela as a more complex and arguably sympathetic figure, even if only a fraction of her contributions would actually make it onscreen.
The only real information she found in the script concerned her character’s prominent class ring, and from there Palmer extrapolated an entire backstory where Pamela had a high school boyfriend during the 1940s that got her pregnant and then skipped town. This led to Pamela being forced to raise her child all on her own during a deeply conservative period in American history – another reason why the character is so bothered by the camp counselors’ promiscuity.
It was Tom Savini who first revealed to Palmer that Jason was going to be depicted as being disabled (an idea that wasn’t in the original screenplay), with this crucial addition making the actress realize that Ms. Voorhees was already overburdened even before the death of her son. The tragedy only pushed her over the edge as she became a puritanical vigilante attempting to shut down Camp Crystal Lake at any cost.
For Palmer, this means that “Camp Blood” never had any curse, as the multiple fires and poisoned water incidents that kept the camp from reopening before the summer of 1979 were merely part of Ms. Voorhees’ years-long vendetta against the property’s owners. Palmer also insisted that the killer in the sequels isn’t the original Jason, as he definitively drowned at the bottom of Crystal Lake. According to her, having Pamela’s child return even as a killer revenant would undo her entire character arc, meaning that the masked murderer who takes over her legacy must be someone or something else entirely!
CRYSTAL LAKE — (Photo by: Matt Infante/PEACOCK)
These ideas match up with most of what we’ve heard about Peacock and A24’s plans for the upcoming series, which is set to follow Linda Cardellini as Pamela after she gives up a career as a singer in order to take care of her disabled son, played by Callum Vinson. That’s why I wouldn’t be surprised if the writing team decided to borrow from the woman behind the machete in order to make the series more authentic to the source material.
Of course, there are rumors floating around that the show could also feature a teenage Jason in some capacity, so we’re still not sure about how exactly Kane and company plan to adapt their project to the franchise’s ever-changing mythology. That’s why I’d like to invite fellow readers to comment below with your own theories about where you think the prequel show is headed!
For now, I think it’s safe to say that Friday the 13th fans are more than ready to binge-watch Pamela’s bloody origin story when it finally drops this October. And who knows? Maybe the show’s success could finally lead to a new mainline film…
CRYSTAL LAKE — Pictured: Linda Cardellini as Pamela Voorhees — (Photo by: Peacock)
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