Historically, Bret Easton Ellis’s paranoia-soaked stories have translated pretty well to the big screen, from Mary Harron’s millennial adaptation of American Psycho, to Roger Avary’s The Rules of Attraction. Hopefully, Luca Guadagnino’s take on the novelist’s most recent LA fever dream, The Shards, will be a similarly successful collaboration when it arrives via HBO. Ellis himself, however, is set to take the director’s chair on another newly unveiled project titled Relapse.
Marking Ellis’ directorial debut – despite his long-term involvement in various Hollywood productions – Relapse is described as “elevated horror” and stars actor Joseph Quinn, who got his breakout role in season four of Stranger Things.
As revealed in the film’s announcement (via Variety), Quinn will play Matt Cullen, a young man who witnesses a brutal death at a debauched party, and subsequently checks into rehab. Cut to three months later: Matt is staying at his parents’ mansion in the hills of Los Angeles and looks set to get his life back on track, until things inevitably begin to unravel.
“Fueled by his unstable personality and the invading power of social media, Matt Cullen’s paranoia grows, messing with his rehabilitation program,” reads the official Relapse synopsis. “As he starts using again, a mysterious presence starts growing around Matt, and a monster that has been haunting him since he was a teenager reveals itself. His therapist tries to help, convinced that the monster is actually in Matt’s head.”
This blend of psychological thriller, with blurred lines between the protagonist’s inner life and a real (or possibly imagined) external threat, probably sounds familiar to Bret Easton Ellis fans. “It will have my strokes: sex, drugs and paranoia,” he explains in a press statement. “It will also be a fun, lush and commercial feature film for a lot of people to enjoy.”
Ellis adds that he was inspired by the “iconic horror movies of the 1970s” that he watched growing up, but wanted to add his own spin with Relapse: “I’ve never seen a monster movie in the kind of upscale LA setting I wrote about and I am familiar with.”
Relapse is produced by the Paris-based SND, which describes it as “body horror” comparable to the likes of The Thing, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Alien. Alongside director duties, the script is written by Ellis, who has previously written four films, including The Canyons and Smiley Face Killers.