Screen Gems has snapped up the rights to Beautiful Girl, a psycho-thriller from a most unlikely source: Michael Cunningham, author of worthy, weighty novels like The Hours.
Of course, as anyone who sat through Stephen Daldry’s movie version of The Hours could attest, Cunningham would have to go some to come up with anything more terrifying, but with Beautiul Girl, he may well have managed it.
It’s a story about a high school girl in her senior year who attracts the attention of her English teacher after she loses a lot of weight (six dress sizes, to be precise). But things start to unravel when the English teacher goes doolally and starts targeting anyone who was cruel to the girl during her heavier days.
Sounds intriguing – Cunningham is a fine writer, whose credits also include the novel and screenplay for A Home At The End Of The World, and it’s a pleasant surprise to find that he’s also something of a genre-loving gorehound.
"While I was writing about Virginia Wolff, my mind was never far removed from the idea of girls in bikinis being hacked up by guys wearing hockey masks, and I vowed that if I ever had a good idea, I would write one of these scary movies," Cunningham told Daily Variety. And God bless him for it – apparently, he also has plans for a monster movie.
Screen Gems won an auction with other studios to bag the **Beautiful Girl **spec script, and Douglas Wick and Lucy Fisher will produce.