It's been without an official title ever since it was first announced in the middle of last year, but Oren Peli's mysterious ghost-town movie has now been officially named **The Chernobyl Diaries. It's just been picked up for distribution by Alcon and Warner Bros.
The Paranormal Activity director wasn't actually behind the cameras for this one, ceding the calling of the actual shots to Bradley Parker, an FX man with credits on Fight Club and Let Me In. Peli wrote the film with brothers Shane and Carey Van Dyke (grandsons of Dick). And he's producing, under the Paranormal Films banner that's also been home to James Wan's Insidious and Rob Zombie's Lords Of Salem.
The Chernobyl Diaries, which rumour has it for some time was called 'The Diary Of Lawson Oxford', involves a group of friends who get stranded in the city of Prypiat, once home to the Chernobyl plant workers, but abandoned since the nuclear disaster of 1986. Nature (and, by the sound of it, something un-natural) has taken hold in the meantime, given the inhuman cries the Scooby Gang start hearing on the night air.
It may sound like it's in very questionable taste, but Peli says it's "the kind of scary movie I know I'd happily stand in line to see."
The cast includes Jonathan Sadowski (the 2009 Friday 13th), Devin Kelley (TV's The Chicago Code), Nathan Phillips (Wolf Creek), and singer Jesse McCartney, and the film will be released in the States on Memorial Day weekend, which by our calculations means May 25th.
There's no word of a UK release date yet, or of Peli's Area 51.