It was reported last week that Dario Argento’s next project will be an English-language homage to his genre of choice, titled simply GIALLO and set to star his daughter Asia, Vincent Gallo as a serial murderer and Ray Liotta as the cop trying to stop his rampage. The script was written by Sean Keller and Jim Agnew, the former of whom dropped Fango a line to convey his excitement about the project. “Jim and I are huge fans of the gialli of Argento, Mario Bava, Sergio Martino, etc., and decided to write a spec screenplay that was a love letter to the genre we affectionately call fashion-horror. We are essentially huge horror/exploitation geeks with a rather fetishistic love for Italian art direction, so we treated the writing of the script as a challenge to identify and incorporate as many of the giallo staples as we could into our story—and we crammed a lot of them in there.
“We never dreamed that Dario Argento would read our script, let alone like it enough to want to direct it,” Keller continues. “It still hasn’t completely sunk in. Dario Argento likes us! How cool is that? And the cast so far is awesome. The fact that it is moving so fast has our heads spinning. And as if working with one of our idols isn’t enough, we have another genre master attached to direct our screenplay L.A. GOTHIC: the one and only Dr. John Carpenter! We managed to sign a deal with producers Josh Kesselman and Danny Sherman of Principal Entertainment on Halloween Day—just hours before the WGA strike.” The L.A. GOTHIC synopsis passed along by Keller describes the project as “five interwoven stories of high-octane horror centering on a vengeful ex-priest’s efforts to protect his teenage daughter from the supernatural evils of LA’s dark side.”
“Argento and Carpenter!” Keller raves. “These are the guys who made us who we are. They are the ones who not only scared the shit out of us as kids, but also filled us with the desire to scare everyone around us. And these two geniuses are both going to help us scare the shit out of all of you!”
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