If you hated reading Shakespeare in school, Alice Lowe’s new horror movie is right up your alley. Deadline reports that the director behind Prevenge and the 2024 comedy Timestalker is developing a horror version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Bard’s classic tale of mistaken identity, under a new two-picture deal with Western Edge Pictures, which previously produced her other films.
Lowe is set to write, direct, and star in the film, which does not have a logline but will loosely adapt the story originally written in 1595, and has since been adapted for film numerous times, including in 1999, in a version that starred Michelle Pfeiffer, Kevin Kline, Stanley Tucci, and Christian Bale, among others.
“I wanted to make a classic and it struck me that Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I know so well, is always made in the same way over and over,” Lowe told Deadline. “It’s so genuinely funny. But also fey and fairies and blah blah blah. But I don’t see why it couldn’t be revisited with how terrifying and odd everything happens in it, and how the undercurrents are actually so dark and strange.”
In addition to her horror take on Shakespeare, which will shoot sometime next year, Lowe is also developing Sprites for Western Edge, a horror comedy about a little girl who joins a girl guide (or Girl Scouts, for us here in the States) group. She’ll also write, direct, and star in that film as well, though according to Deadline has no plans to cast herself in a leading role in either film.
“The film in some ways is autobiographical,” Lowe says of Sprites. “It’s set in the early 80s, which is a period that fascinates me. It’s a time when things were rapidly changing and I think the onset of the individualism that is today the mainstay of our psyches and society at large… But I also see it as a transition between the trust in the monarchy, authority, in the church, in religion, in the community and into something more formless and self-centred. Sort of liminal…. And so, as a kid, you could slip through those cracks. So at core it’s about being afraid of adults!”
No release date has been announced for either Lowe’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Sprites. Stay tuned to FANGORIA for more updates as they arrive.
