American Psycho director and screenwriter reteam for The Family

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Not too shy of twenty years ago, director Mary Harron and her co-screenwriter Guinevere Turner took on the daunting task of adapting Bret Easton Ellis's infamous novel American Psycho for the screen. Luckily, many a genre fan feels that they did an excellent job. Even those who aren't quite as enamored with AMERICAN PSYCHO as others will likely admit, "At least it's better than AMERICAN PSYCHO II." (Harron, Turner, and Ellis had no involvement with that one.)

A few years after that, Harron and Turner collaborated again on the biopic THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE. Now they're set to craft a third film together, one that will take them back toward horrific subject matter. Together, the women will be making THE FAMILY, and the family in question is the Manson family.

Harron and Turner are drawing from two different sources for this one; the 1971 novel The Family, by Ed Sanders, and Karlene Faith's nonfiction book The Long Prison Journey of Leslie Houten: Life Beyond the Cult, first published in 2001.

THE FAMILY will be 

an examination of the infamous Manson Family murders through the eyes of graduate student Karlene Faith as she works with three young, brainwashed women who were part of the cult.

Initially given the death penalty for their involvement in the crimes, during which nine people were murdered including actress Sharon Tate, their sentences ultimately were commuted to life imprisonment. The film is a procedural that will focus on Faith’s time attempting to teach the three women and on their personal transformations as they slowly grasp the reality of their crimes. 

Sounds like an interesting approach to the endlessly fascinating but perhaps too frequently visited story of the Manson family. Harron and Turner's film is currently casting, with an aim to be filming in Los Angeles this summer.

THE FAMILY is being produced by Jeremy M. Rosen and Kevin Shulman of Roxwell Films, with Dana Guerin, Michael Guerin, and David Hillary executive producing.