Underworld Awakening Directors Join Swedish Cults

Steve Barton   |  

Mar 27, 2012

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Fresh off of their stint making the most brainless Underworld movie to date, the directing duo of Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein already have their next project lined up!

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein, the Swedish directing team behind Underworld: Awakening, are returning to home turf for their next project: an adaptation of the horror novel Collected Swedish Cults from author Andres Fager.

Book Synopsis
At Underryd Dance Hall in the woods outside of the boring midsized town of Borås, there has been dancing and partying since the dawn of time. There, a group of teenage girls meet to party, but they seem to have more on the agenda than just drinking and flirting. When darkness falls, they lure a young man out into the marsh behind the Dance Hall building to meet with the Messenger, a creature who is as old and ugly as he is powerful. They have done it many times before and their mothers before them, but this time something goes terribly wrong.

Grandmother is going on a journey. Zami and Janoch, brothers from the immigrant suburb of Rosengård outside Malmö, have been given a mission: They are going to cross Europe by car to pick up Grandmother in the Balkans and bring her back to the new country up north. But the brothers have never driven a car before; they have never even handled money and never spoken to anyone outside the family. And they keep to the shadows; people have a tendency to freak out when they get a look at Janoch…

Collected Swedish Cults is a collection of short stories divided into three books, but it’s more than that. Anders Fager himself compares the form with that of a modern American TV series, such as
“True Blood” or “Lost”. Each short story, or episode, tells a story of its own as well as adds a piece to the puzzle of the whole. And just as a TV series with each new season adds a new perspective, each of the three books of Collected Swedish Cults shows the Fager universe from a new angle. What first appears to be a traditional collection of short stories soon evolves into a web of tales building an epic saga of good versus evil in a world inhabited by the supernatural.

Anders Fager is the latest and most interesting example of the strong trend of Swedish horror that started with John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In in 2004, taking the young adult supernatural trend into darker territory. Fager presents a modern, adult and quite violent take on the horror story reminiscent of Stephen King at his darkest, or perhaps a John Ajvide Lindqvist on steroids, inspired by the world of classic horror master H.P. Lovecraft. It is at the same time completely realistic and utterly monstrous.

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