Nicolas Winding Refn renames latest movie The Neon Demon

• Gary Green


• 4 Nov 2014

Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn – the man behind Drive – has announced his next directorial project: A horror movie with female leads, by the name of The Neon Demon. Except, the film itself isn’t exactly new; it’s been in development for roughly a year now, with Refn and Mary Laws writing the screenplay. This marks a change, since it was originally believed that Polly Stenham – a playwright with one TV credit to her name – was writing the movie. Refn stated in a press release, via Variety:

“One morning I woke and realized I was both surrounded and dominated by women. Strangely, a sudden urge was planted in me to make a horror film about vicious beauty… After making ‘Drive’ and falling madly in love with the electricity of Los Angeles, I knew I had to return to tell the story of ‘The Neon Demon’.”

If Drive and Only God Forgives are anything to go by, expect The Neon Demon to be another highly idiosyncratic exercise in art-pulp from Refn. Shooting begins in early 2015, with no confirmed cast as of yet (although Carey Mulligan has been rumoured for a while now, but that was before I Walk With the Dead changed into The Neon Demon).