EXCLUSIVE: Brit multi-hyphenate and comedian Alice Lowe has inked a two-picture deal with UK production company Western Edge Pictures (WEP) after they previously collaborated on Lowe’s feature directorial debut Prevenge and 2024 comedy Timestalker.
Lowe, who also co-starred in and co-wrote cult comedy Sightseers, is now lining up a horror version of Shakespeare classic A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Sprites, a dark comedy horror about a little girl joining a girl guide group. The plan is for her to write, direct, and have a key — but not lead — role in both.
Lowe told Deadline of the former, which the team is hoping to make next summer: “I wanted to make a classic and it struck me that Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I know so well, is always made in the same way over and over. It’s so genuinely funny. But also fey and fairies and blah blah blah. But I don’t see why it couldn’t be revisited with how terrifying and odd everything happens in it, and how the undercurrents are actually so dark and strange.”
Vaughan Sivell of WEP added: “The deeper pitch is amazing. It’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, but it’s very much Alice’s take on it. All the best bits, all the comedy and magic, but in a totally original space and setting. It can be truly international in its casting and aesthetic.”
Lowe said of Sprites: “The film in some ways is autobiographical. It’s set in the early 80s, which is a period that fascinates me. It’s a time when things were rapidly changing and I think the onset of the individualism that is today the mainstay of our psyches and society at large. It was also a confusing time, for me, because I was an actual child! But I also see it as a transition between the trust in the monarchy, authority, in the church, in religion, in the community and into something more formless and self-centred. Sort of liminal. You only have to look at Jimmy Savile and how he slipped through the cracks to see how there was a perception or culture shift.”
She continued: “More so than today our parents would be saying one thing, but doing another. And it seems to me this was a kind of betrayal of contracts in families. So there was still a rigidity of behaving and conforming. A trust in institutions. But yet, society was starting to abandon those rules. Institutional abuse and misuse of those rules. And so, as a kid, you could slip through those cracks. So at core it’s about being afraid of adults!”
Sivell added: “We talked a lot about Alice doing her take on a classic and yet having the freedom to do something truly original – and in the end we decided to do both. Sprites is the very best idiosyncrasies of Britain that comedy and horror audiences around the world have loved so much since Monty Python. We are now looking for the right partners for each of these movies.”
The post Alice Lowe & Western Edge Pictures Line Up ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ Horror Film & Girl Guide Dark Comedy ‘Sprite’ appeared first on Deadline.
