You know the story… Boy meets girl on a train. Girl turns out to be a foaming, psychopathic lunatic. It’s a plot as old as time and would probably have been used by Shakespeare if, you know, trains had been around back then. But now it’s the basic plot for a new take on Patricia Highsmith’s novel Strangers on a Train, most famously adapted by one Alfred Hitchcock and currently labouring under the slightly unwieldy title Teens on a Train.
Teens on a Train? Really? Yes, we’re wondering that too, and hopefully it’s just a placeholder tile while they try to think up something a little less obvious. Admittedly, Strangers on a Train is fairly straight and descriptive, but it has a little more poetry to it. In that film, it was two men who met and agreed to each kill the other's nemesis, the better to avoid detection.
The idea has been generated by Slingshot Productions, which ran a competition in 2007 to find script ideas that mashed up Hitchcock with teenagers. Material Girl writer Joshua St Johnston has gotten involved to bash out a screenplay based on the concept and BBC Films is helping Slingshot develop the project. Oh, and according to Deadline, the producers are using Before Sunrise as almost equal inspiration alongside Hitchcock/Highsmith’s work.
From the sound of it (since Strangers involved swapping murders, not Fatal Attraction-style stalking) it should be different enough that it doesn’t run into the same legal trouble faced (and, just last week, won) by Disturbia.
But **Fatal Attraction **gives us a killer idea for a new title: Fatal At-track-tion! See? Because it's on a train. Which runs on a track. A-Track-tion? Anyone? Who let those crickets into the room?