What with the city-bashing beast of Cloverfield and the hungry vampire girl of Let Me In, Matt Reeves just can’t stay away from the creepy/dangerous side of life. And he’s continuing that theme by agreeing to adapt and direct a film based on Ray Nelson’s paranoia-driven sci-fi short story 8 O’clock in the Morning for Universal.
Nelson’s plot finds a man waking up one day with absolute knowledge that aliens are controlling our society. If the story sounds familiar, that’s because it was used as the basis for John Carpenter’s sci-fi satire They Live.
This new take, however is not planned as a remake: “I saw an opportunity to do a movie that was very point-of-view driven, a psychological science fiction thriller that explores this guy’s nightmare,” Reeves tells Deadline. “There could be a desperate love story at the centre of this. Carpenter took a satirical view of the material and the larger political implication that we’re being controlled. I am very drawn to the emotional side, the nightmare experience with the paranoia of Invasion of the Body Snatchers or a Roman Polanski-style film.”
Strike Entertainment’s Eric Newman will be overseeing the new movie for Universal, and he explained why he thought Reeves was the best candidate: “Whether it was the POV of the camera in Cloverfield or the young boy realizing that a vampire was living next door in Let Me In, Matt’s work shines at that. There is a paranoid element to this, but the audience is in lock step with this guy, seeing the aliens from his point of view.”
Given how well he handled both genres before (particularly Let Me In), we expect big things from this…