Just ahead of the EFM in Berlin, it was revealed that Keanu Reeves, Christina Hendricks, Elle Fanning, Abbey Lee, Jena Malone and Bella Heathcote would star in Nicolas Winding Refn’s subversive horror tale, The Neon Demon.
“One morning I woke and realized I was both surrounded and dominated by women. Strangely, a sudden urge was planted in me to make a horror film about vicious beauty,” Refn original told Variety about the origins of the movie. “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.”
Plot details have been thin, citing that Fanning will play an aspiring model who is caught in a world of beauty and demise.
New info surfaced, courtesy of Whatculture, who reports that the movie is actually about cannibal supermodels.
“…the film is about a group of supermodels going to extremes in their attempts to keep looking the way they do. What this translates into is voodoo and cannibalism.
“There’s a little Countess Bathory in this concept,” they add. “To put it bluntly, she’s the crazy lady who had virgins murdered so she could bathe in their blood. She was a monster.”
What is clear is that Lee will play a cool ringleader that other girls want to follow. Envious, emotionally unstable and a tad delusional, she shows her true maniacal colors in the end. After first creeping Jesse out by sucking the blood out of her wound, she ends up killing and later eating Jesse to absorb her virginal youth and beauty.
Refn’s partner, Lene Borglum (Valhalla Rising, Only God Forgives) is producing via their joint company, Space Rocket.
