Since his crazy Gallic breakout Switchblade Romance, he's been all about the Hollywood horror remakes: The Hills Have Eyes, Mirrors, Piranha (he was even talking to Paramount about **Pet Sematary for a while). But Alexandre Aja is now finally set to break that cycle, since he's signed on to direct **Horns{
A dark fantasy about jealousy, murder, treehouses, rebirth by fire, and The Rolling Stones, Horns revolves around Ig Perrish, who wakes up one morning with a terrible hangover, and the titular protruburances growing out of his head. Hate when that happens.
He also finds that people are suddenly compelled to confide in him their innermost thoughts and secrets, and that he can influence their behaviour, as long as he's nudging them towards actions they truly desire. All of which proves useful in unravelling the mystery surrounding the violent death of his fractious girlfriend Merrin, for which Ig himself is a prime suspect.
The book was published last year, and immediately snapped up by Mandalay Pictures and a keen-as-mustard Shia LaBeouf. There's no mention of LaBeouf in THR's story this morning, which is odd, because when Empire spoke to Hill recently, he was pretty clear about the actor's involvement.
"Shia is going to play Ig," Hill told us, "and I think he's a great fit for the part. He can play that kind of innocent Jimmy Stewart sweetness, but I also think it’d be really fun to see him with the shaved head and the horns walking around in a blue dress. I think he wants to make that transformation. People haven't seen him do something like this. It’s almost a metaphor for his whole professional outlook: he’s played so many clean-cut nice guys that he wants people to see that he can be the demon if he has to be. It's not as unusual as it used to be for an actor to be attached at such an early stage of development. I think a lot of actors have started to do this: getting excited about about something and looking at how they can put a package together."
The screenplay has been written by Keith Bunin (TV's In Treatment), and Mandalay's Cathy Schulman and Peter Guber are producing. Hill will serve as executive producer, but sounds as if he's happy to remain hands-off. "I’ll be as involved as they want me to be, and I won’t be underfoot if they don’t want me underfoot," he told us. "I’ve done my version of the story, and I had a couple of suggestions that I thought might streamline a film. But at the end of the day I’ve done my version and the movie has to be something different. Films fail either when they treat the source material as if it doesn’t matter, or when they become too reverential to the source material. You want to find a middle path where a film can breathe and be its own deal."
Shooting is planned to start in the spring or early summer of next year, after which Aja will return to his pet project, the manga space pirates adventure **Cobra.
Mandalay is also developing Hill's short story Twittering From The Circus Of The Dead, with The Apparition's director Todd Lincoln behind the cameras. "He's done a lot of short films that are kind of upsetting and weird," Hill enthuses. "He's exciting; he's a realy cool guy. He's kind of like if Wes Anderson decided to make horror films."