McKee and Bettis Reunite for Ketchum Adaptation of ‘Offspring: The Woman’

Anyone who’s ever read a novel by Jack Ketchum can tell you that he can, on occasion, be one mean son of a bitch. All of his stories are dark; and then some of them are really dark. He excels at evoking woe, dread, and hopeless bitter terror. So when we hear that that he’s teamed up with director Lucky McKee and actress Angela Bettis, which is the team that brought us the excellent May, for an upcoming film to be released in 2011, it has our attention.

McKee, Bettis, and Ketchum are now working together on Offspring: The Woman, a sequel to Ketchum’s novel Offspring. Ketchum not only wrote the novel, but the script itself; he is said to be working closely with McKee in order to better bring his story to life. The story centers on a lone female survivor (to be played by Pollyanna McIntosh) of a bizarre and rather primitive cannibalistic clan that had previously assaulted a Maine town (see: Offspring), and her roaming fight for survival. A local hunter has taken it upon himself to attempt to track and capture the woman, mostly in the (likely mistaken) belief that he can "civilize" her. Angela Bettis has signed on to play the hunter’s wife, Belle.

McKee recently gave a quote to Fangoria regarding the upcoming film, saying it "...is an exploration of the very definition of horror. It is designed to incite feelings of fear, shock, nervousness, dismay, anxiety and disgust. It is designed to make you question what it is to be civilized, what it is to be feral and all the shades of gray in between. On a surface level, the film will make you jump, it will make you squirm and, for the more sensitive, it might even induce nausea. It will make you question my intentions in making it, as well as your own desire to watch it.

"The photography will become increasingly aggressive, gritty and bold, coupled with an escalating, visceral cutting style, all of which will call to mind Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But it won’t be just blood and guts that will make you feel this way. More than anything, it will be the situation. It will be the actions of the characters, their twisted ideals, their tortured souls and the frightening believability of it all. You want a horror movie? Offspring: The Woman will be horror by definition. To sum it up in an unsophisticated way: I’m going to scare the hell out of you."

This is a project that certainly has a lot of potential. McKee and Bettis have shown they have real talent in their now classic May, and the works of Ketchum are oozing with mean character. Good times.