Nicholl Fellowship Winners The Vang Brothers Reinvent Bogeyman With ‘Bedeviled’
Author: Anthony D’Alessandro
Print: Deadline
Abel and Burlee Vang, who won the Nicholl Fellowship in 2011 for their Hmong/CIA secret wars screenplay The Tiger’s Child, are in production on their first feature directorial collaboration Bedeviled, a horror film which is described as a cross between Spike Jonze’s Her and Stephen King’s It.
Saxon Sharbino of Fox/MGM’s recent Poltergeist reboot and NBC series Touch plays a teenager who downloads a mysterious app that begins to haunt her.
Brandon Soo Hoo of El Rey’s From Dusk Till Dawn plays Dan, the class-clown friend of the teenage group who doesn’t believe in the supernatural. Victory Van Tuyl plays his girlfriend Hayley, who dreams of being an actress.
Alexis G. Zall (Ouija 2) plays one of the first girls to download the killer app.
Style wise, the film pays homage to such Japanese filmmakers as Masaki Kobayashi (Kwaidan) and Takashi Miike (Gozu). Last year the Vangs made a short sci-fi action short Sentient (see video below), which enabled them to get funding for Bedeviled.
“Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, these guys are gone and for a different generation,” Abel Vang told Deadline late Thursday night after we visited the set, which on that day was taking place at a California Craftsman home in a Washington Blvd. neighborhood close to downtown. Abel Vang is a 2011 graduate of USC Film School.
“The supernatural villains of today aren’t charismatic enough. They’re just killing machines. We created a character like Hannibal Lector and The Joker, but in a supernatural film. We’re reinventing the bogeyman with this app,” added Burlee Vang about the plot.
MTV Teen Wolf episode director and special effects/make-up artist Rob Hall (Paranormal Activity 4, Area 51, Superbad) is co-executive producing Bedeviled. Also executive producing are Fuabkuab Yang along with Conduit Now executives Stephen Stanley and Brad Brizendine in conjunction with Badlands Features producer Kirk Roos. He’s been behind such indie films as Magnolia Pictures’ The Brass Teapot, Millennium’s High Road and most recently FilmBuff’s A Better You. Bryn Roos of Badlands is also co-producing. Leng and Cheng Yang are also producers. Sharbino is repped by The Gersh Agency. Soo Hoo is a client of Paradigm and DreamScope Entertainment. Zall is repped by Innovative Artists and Principato-Young Entertainment. Van Tuyl is repped by UTA and managed by Industry Entertainment.
