One of the downsides to the glut of found-footage movies coming out over the past few years—other than the existence of said found-footage movies—is the way they tend to make the cinema-minded but untrained among us look at those films and say, “Hey, I could do that!” That’s why it’s a delightful surprise when a found-footage film comes along that actually seems to have people involved who know where to place a camera, like Afflicted, the 2013 horror film that offered a refreshingly gruesome and straightforward take on vampire lore. And now the writer-directors of that film are signing on to a more ambitious project: Deadline reports that Derek Lee and Clif Prowse are set to helm an adaptation of Trevor Stone’s novel Children Of Paranoia.
Stone’s novel is the first book in a trilogy, which presumably CBS Films is eager to continue adapting should this first one be successful. Children Of Paranoia tells the story of a young man whose sister is tragically killed in a clandestine global war that has been going on for centuries. The man then “becomes a secret soldier in the battle, assassinating enemy targets from the shadows. Then he falls for a beautiful young woman who causes him to question which side he’s really on—good or evil.” And no, apparently he’s not able to just walk up to one of his fellow soldiers and ask, “So, this whole killing lots of people thing—are we the good guys or the bad guys?” That would spoil the fun, if by fun you mean sociopaths not caring who they execute.
The script is currently being re-written by Marc Haimes, who we haven’t heard of, but if he’s the Marc Haimes we found on IMDB, he’s a strange choice. Haimes appears to be a long-time studio executive who recently moved into screenwriting, and is now seeing one of his scripts turned into a movie starring Matthew McConaughey and Charlize Theron. No word yet on a production start date for Children Of Paranoia, but if things go wrong Prowse and Lee can just go back to Europe and film it by themselves, like they did the first time.