Vincenzo Natali Scares Up A Haunter

So what about Neuromancer?Post-Splice, director Vincenzo Natali has been attached to a few potential projects. They've all been literary adaptations, including JG Ballard's High Rise, Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams' Tunnels series, and most excitingly, William Gibson's Neuromancer. Natalis has ticked the box marked "none of the above" for the time being though, since his immediate next film has just been announced as Haunter.Described as a "reverse ghost story", Haunter stems from an original screenplay by Brian King, who also wrote Natali's Cypher in 2002. It seems to have shades of The Others and Beetlejuice, in that it's told from the perspective of the haunter rather than the haunted: in this case a girl called Lisa who's been manifesting in the same house since she met an unfortunate end in 1986. She sees an opportunity for some closure when new girl Olivia moves in.So what's happened to Neuromancer? Immediatey the highest-profile project on Natali's pencilled in future slate, itwas reportedly moving ahead and into pre-production last May, with production proper hoped for in the first quarter of this year. That's now clearly not happening, since Haunter is reportedly shooting in Toronto in March (expect more details in the near future).Fear not, fans of Case and Molly. As of last autumn, Neuromancer was still very much a going concern, with Natali, his producer Jay Firestone, Canada Media Fund's Francesca Accineli, and videogame developer Trevor Fencott presenting a packed-out panel at the Toronto International Film Festival to update on its development and muse on their approach. The whole 75-minute discussion is available on YouTube, and there are helpfully transcribed edited highlights over at The Tyee."It's still ahead of the curve," said Natali of Gibson's visionary novel. "My argument has always been that now is the time to makeNeuromancer, because I believe that had you made this film in 1984 [when the novel was published] it would have been incomprehensible. There's no way, without an extraordinary amount of exposition, that a film audience would have been able to understand some of the concepts in the book which now are actually a part of our daily lives."There's plenty more where that came from, so head over to one of those links to find out why Natali isn't much concerned about the very much Gibson-influenced The Matrix having reached the screen first, and how his vision of cyberspace is neither Matrix nor Tron-like. "This domain you project yourself into, as the cyberjockeys do inNeuromancer, is not necessarily very friendly for human beings," Natali believes. "As wetware, as carbon-based lifeforms, evolution hasn't designed us to go into that kind of virtual environment. So it's a very rough ride and only certain people can do it..."