Play Dead: Bailee Madison, Jerry O’Connell star in Patrick Lussier’s morgue-set thriller

Last September, we heard that Patrick Lussier, director of My Bloody Valentine 3D (watch it HERE) and Drive Angry (watch that one HERE), was heading into production on a new horror project called Play Dead… and the title was the only information we had on it at that time. Now Screen Daily has managed to dig up some more details. Starting with the information that the film stars Bailee Madison (The Strangers: Prey at Night), Jerry O’Connell (Stand by Me), Anthony Turpel (Love, Victor), Chris Butler (Designated Survivor), Chris Lee (Legacies), and Jorge-Luis Pallo (Cry Macho).

Written by Adam Mason and Simon Boyes, Play Dead centers on

criminology student Chloe (Madison), who fakes her own death to break into a local morgue to steal a piece of evidence that ties her younger brother to a crime. Once inside she discovers the coroner (O’Connell) is using the business as a front to sell body parts. When the coroner discovers Chloe is not dead, a game of cat-and-mouse ensues.

Play Dead, which was filmed in the morgue of an abandoned asylum, was produced by Adam Mason, Lucas Jarach, Bradley Pilz, and Madison’s The Strangers: Prey at Night director Johannes Roberts. Nicolas Chartier, Jonathan Deckter, Adam Hendricks, Greg Gilreath, and Simon Boyes serve as executive producers.

Voltage Pictures will be presenting the project to potential buyers at the Cannes film market.

I’m a fan of Lussier’s work and thought Madison did a good job as a horror heroine in the Strangers sequel, so I look forward to seeing how Play Dead will turn out. Are you interested in this movie? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

Lussier got his start as an editor, with his credits including the Wes Craven projects New Nightmare, Vampire in Brooklyn, Scream, Scream 2, Scream 3, Cursed, and Red Eye, as well as Halloween H20: 20 Years Later and Guillermo del Toro’s Mimic. He made his directorial debut with The Prophecy 3: The Ascent, and has gone on to direct Dracula 2000, Dracula II: Ascension, Dracula III: Legacy, White Noise 2: The Light, Trick, and Into the Dark: Flesh & Blood, as well as the films mentioned in the first paragraph and episodes of the Scream and The Purge TV shows. Lussier also wrote several of the films he directed, and co-wrote Terminator: Genisys.