American Psycho team plots vampire tale The Orange Eats Creeps

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Mary Harron, director of AMERICAN PSYCHO (that's Christian Bale as the psycho himself above), and that film's screenwriter, Guinevere Turner, recently reteamed on a movie about the Manson Family called CHARLIE SAYS. While CHARLIE SAYS is seeking distribution, Harron and Turner are already planning their next genre project: an adaptation of Grace Krilanovich's novel THE ORANGE EATS CREEPS (you can order a copy of the novel HERE).

As described by Harron, Krilanovich's "underground, experimental" novel is about a group of feral homeless teenagers, "Young people travelling around the northeast [of America], living around the highways."

The official description of the book gives more details: 

It's the '90s Pacific Northwest refracted through a dark mirror, where meth and madness hash it out in the woods. . . . A band of hobo vampire junkies roam the blighted landscape—trashing supermarket breakrooms, praying to the altar of Poison Idea and GG Allin at basement rock shows, crashing senior center pancake breakfasts—locked in the thrall of Robitussin trips and their own wild dreams.

A girl with drug-induced ESP and an eerie connection to Patty Reed (a young member of the Donner Party who credited her survival to her relationship with a hidden wooden doll), searches for her disappeared foster sister along "The Highway That Eats People," stalked by a conflation of Twin Peaks' "Bob" and the Green River Killer, known as Dactyl.

I haven't read the book, but it certainly sounds interesting and unique. Some things about it give me the feeling Krilanovich might have been inspired by the early works of Gus Van Sant.

Harron and Turner's adaptation is being developed and produced through New York's Greencard Pictures. The director intends to make THE ORANGE EATS CREEPS her next film after she shoots a Salvador Dali biopic starring Ben Kingsley in the spring of next year.