Horror filmmakers are always looking for unexplored territory in the genre, and what’s more terrifying than the fashion world? Only God Forgives writer/director Nicholas Winding Refn seems to have figured that out with The Neon Demon, his new movie which casts young Elle Fanning as an aspiring fashion model who’s about to get eaten alive by the industry. Maybe literally?
The trailer, which just dropped today, seems to depict an awesomely stylized film, with the actors’s rarefied beauty as the key blunt instrument. Over a pulsing dance track, we see blood, sex and smize for days, with stars like Fanning, Abbey Lee Kershaw, Jena Malone, Keanu Reeves and an actual cougar looking hella gorgeous and hella zooted beneath strobe lights and camera flashes. “I am dangerous,” says someone we can presume to be Fanning, as the clip ends on a shot of her covered in blood, like a high-fashion Carrie. (Christina Hendricks is in this film too, though I don’t catch her in the trailer.)
From a press release, here is our poet laureate Keanu Reeves describing what he thinks a “neon demon” actually is:
“There’s something about the light—you can call it artificial light, but I guess all light is artificial besides the sun—and the neon quality of it. [There’s] something about those colors that attracts and repulses at the same time. And then there’s the demon part. What is the demon within; what is the demon on the outside? Is it ego? It may be a fear of death. Or desire. It’s all sorts of fun stuff.”
Death... or desire. The Neon Demon, an Amazon Studios title, will debut at Cannes and open wide this June.