Christian Bale tends to be very selective when it comes to choosing his projects, but he’ll always make time in his schedule for Scott Cooper, with the duo having become close friends after working together on slow-burning thrillers Out of the Furnace and Hostiles.
Cooper’s latest directorial effort Antlers takes him out of his regular wheelhouse and into supernatural horror territory, and he’ll be looking to combine the best of both worlds with The Pale Blue Eye. Netflix stumped up $55 million to secure the rights to the intriguing genre film, which is based on the 2003 novel of the same name by Louis Bayard.
Bale plays a veteran detective investigating a series of murders at the U.S. Military’s West Point Academy in 1830, where he’s reluctantly partnered with a rookie cadet and aspiring poet named Edgar Allen Poe. In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Cooper confirmed that cameras on The Pale Blue Eye start rolling very soon.
“We’re about to start shooting in a month. I’m prepping it now. It deals with a series of murders that took place at West Point in 1830 and surrounds a young cadet that the world would come to know as Edgar Allan Poe. So we start shooting from Thanksgiving to the end of February.”
Harry Potter, The Old Guard and The Queen’s Gambit‘s Harry Melling will play Poe, continuing his remarkable resurgence over the last few years, and the prospect of a period-set horror thriller starring Christian Bale is reason enough to get excited over The Pale Blue Eye.
