The ball is finally rolling on Kevin Smith's intriguing Red State: intriguing because its being touted as bleak and serious, rather than as a par-for-the-course pic from Silent Bob.
We've known for a while that the horror film is based to some extent around fundamentalist Christianity, with Smith namedropping Fred Phelps (whose Westboro Baptist Church preaches that God loathes homosexuals and the society that tolerates them) as an "inspiration".
Details on the actual plot have been scarce until now, but Smith has just told Film School Rejects that Red State will in some way be modelled on one of his favourite movies, Race With the Devil, the 1975 occult thriller that sees Warren Oates and Peter Fonda on a camping holiday gone wrong, being hounded through Texas by Satanists.
Red State is "very much in that spirit of people in the wrong place at the wrong time", says Smith, "but Instead of going with devil worship we’re going the other direction. It deals with intense religious worship. There's nothing more horrifying than that. You can keep your fucking thirty-foot shark."
That said, "The movie constantly re-invents itself about every twenty minutes: when you think you have a beat on it, it becomes something else." Which chimes with Smith's previous assertions that this is not in any way a traditional horror film. Hmmm, what does he have in mind? Shooting starts in July.