Teenage vampires are all the hype now, just ask Summit how many DVD copies of the debut film in their franchise sold this past tuesday. Mary Harron hasn’t gotten her hands “bloody” since American Psycho, but will begin filming this summer in the vacant film production city of Montreal with her adaptation of Rachel Klein’s novel The Moth Diaries. I’m not sure which production company is producing the project, but I would speculate Killer Films who were invovled in Harron’s last picture (The Notorious Bettie Page) and who were delighted by the tax breaks they received in the Canadian city with Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There.
Based on the 2002 debut novel from Rachel Klein, set at an exclusive girls’ boarding school, a sixteen year-old girl records her most intimate thoughts in a diary. The object of her growing obsession is her roommate, Lucy Blake, and Lucy’s friendship with their new and disturbing classmate. Ernessa is an enigmatic, moody presence with pale skin, and hypnotic eyes. Around her swirl dark rumors, suspicions, and secrets as well as a series of ominous disasters. As fear spreads through the school and Lucy isn’t Lucy anymore, fantasy and reality mingle until what is true and what is dreamed bleed together into a waking nightmare that evokes with gothic menace the anxieties, lusts, and fears of adolescence. And at the center of the diary is the question that haunts all who read it: Is Ernessa really a vampire? Or has the narrator trapped herself in the fevered world of her own imagining?
