EXCLUSIVE: Elle, Benedetta and Slender Man scribe David Birke is re-teaming with Benedetta and Elle producer Saïd Ben Saïd and with director Pascal Laugier (Incident In A Ghostland) on vampire horror Nocturnal.

The script, which has a fun premise, has been a passion project for U.S. scribe Birke since he was a student and he has returned to it multiple times. The project now has fresh impetus with SBS Productions and SBS International, which is repping sales at the Cannes market. The team is aiming to shoot this fall in Latvia.

Set in 1943, the story begins “with a group of refugees, fleeing Vichy France, who attempt a desperate crossing of the Channel, only to wind up stranded on a supposedly deserted island. The island turns out to be home to an undying supernatural evil. The curse of undeath takes each of the fugitives, one by one, until only one is left alive and still human. She must now adapt to surviving at the margins of the strange, violent and perverse community formed by her former friends.

French filmmaker Laugier, known for genre projects The Tall Man, Martyrs and Incident In A Ghostland, said today: “David’s screenplay is the most powerful, most original story I’ve read in a very long time. It’s a kind of ideal horror tale that combines a truly terrifying narrative with complex, deeply moving characters. The boldness of the story astonished me, and it seems rooted in the fact that David, like me, is a passionate lover of genre cinema. He knows its archetypes, but never mocks them. Instead, he plays with them in an unexpected and sophisticated way. He has that tone, that very personal way of gripping you, of plunging you into an inextricable situation you think you can anticipate—only to completely upend everything. You’re shocked, shaken, but you need to know what happens next.”

He continued: “This ability to draw you in, combined with the exceptional quality of his writing for female characters, is, I must say, a very rare combination. I’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of vampire films in my life, but I’ve never seen one like Nocturnal. And offering a completely fresh vision of a myth that is both so essential and so overused—that’s an irresistible temptation for the film director I am.”

Birke explained today: “I became fascinated with vampires of the female variety at a very young age. One of my earliest memories is of a recurring nightmare that only later in life did I discover was a scene from the Hammer-Christopher Lee version of Dracula, specifically the scene where Lucy tenderly threatens to feed on a child. From the time I started writing stories of my own, I wanted to write a vampire story that would capture that fairy tale mixture of menace and the eerie enchantment that haunted my earliest dreams.

He continued: “I wrote the first draft in college then put it away because I thought the accumulation of The Lost Boys, Near Dark and Coppola’s Dracula had over-saturated the marketplace. I had no idea the flood that was coming. Still every few years, I would drag out Nocturnal and give it another go, only to put it away again. Finally, I decided to hell with it: it’s just a fact that vampires are an eternally popular, infinitely malleable genre- and there still had never been anything like what I was trying to do in my script. The fact is Nocturnal has as much in common with Picnic at Hanging Rock and Lord of the Flies as it does any vampire story. So I took a chance and shared it with Saïd Ben Saïd and was thrilled to discover he shared my enthusiasm for it.”