Story ideas can come to writers in all sorts of mysterious ways, and James Gunn told us that the idea for his new horror film, The Belko Experiment, arrived in his head while he was sleeping.
“I dreamed the trailer for the film,” said Gunn when we spoke with him at the press day for the movie, which he produced as well as wrote. “That’s 100 percent true. And I woke up and I was so excited, because I knew (director) Sean Cunningham dreamt the trailer for Friday the 13th — the teaser trailer. But I dreamt the whole trailer, so I did a little better than that. I dreamt the whole trailer and the first thing I wrote was the trailer,and then I said, ‘I gotta see what happens,’ so I wrote the movie and terrible things happened!”
Indeed: in The Belko Experiment, 80 employees of the mysterious title company are locked inside their Bogota, Colombia office building and told that 30 of them must be killed by their colleagues in the next two hours — or else even worse things await.
Greg McLean (Wolf Creek) directed the gruesome, frightening and blackly humorous mix of satire and horror — as only Gunn can dish it out — with a cast that includes John Gallagher Jr. John C. McGinley, Tony Goldwyn and, of course, Michael Rooker.