There's still no sign of the long-gestating Area 51, but Oren Peli's next film, an untitled nature-run-amok project, has just started shooting in Eastern Europe.
Peli was behind the original no-budget Paranormal Activity, which emerged, blinking in the light of box office glory, in 2009, and spawned a succesful franchise that's still ongoing. Area 51 followed, but since then Peli has preferred to act as producer (James Wan's Insidious; Rob Zombie's Lords Of Salem; Barry Levinson's The Bay) and leave the megaphone in someone else's hands.
That remains the case with this new film: reports back in May suggested Untitled would be Peli's third as director, but it now emerges that Bradley Parker, an FX man with credits on Let Me In and Fight Club, is behind the cameras.
The film, which for reasons unknown has lost its original moniker of The Diary Of Lawson Oxford, involves a group of friends who get stranded in a town that's been abandoned for years following a nuclear disaster. Nature (and, by the sound of it, something un-natural) has taken hold in the meantime. Peli says it's "the kind of scary movie I know I'd happily stand in line to see."
The cast so-far announced includes Jonathan Sadowski (the 2009 Friday 13th), Devin Kelley (TV's The Chicago Code), Nathan Phillips (Wolf Creek), and singer Jesse McCartney.
Last we heard, from Peli cohort Jason Blum, Area 51 is still an ongoing concern. "Like Paranormal Activit****y, we went back like fifty times for additional photography," Blum explained in June. "The great thing about doing extra shooting for inexpensive movies is that the cost is low, so we screen and shoot and screen and shoot..." There's still no release date.