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David Slade to Direct Killer Amphibians Flick Cold Skin

by Brandon Lee Tenney
April 30, 2009

30 Days of Night director David Slade, most recently attributed to his attachment to tween-screech-inducing The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, is set to return to the snow in order to helm Cold Skin. Based on the bestselling Spanish novel of the same name written by Albert Sánchez Piñol, Cold Skin is an Antarctic horror/psychological thriller set on a bleak, barren island. The fairly effects-heavy pic is prepped to shoot in March of 2010 and is reportedly getting a modest budget of about $25 million. It's unknown just how faithful Jesus Olmo's script will be to the novel, but below is a good synopsis straight from Amazon.

In this grim, H.G. Wellsian fable, an unnamed European of unspecified nationality is hired to spend an unspecified mid-20th-century year logging wind conditions on a tiny Antarctic island. Anticipating solitude, the bookish young man soon discovers that he has a neighbor—the pathologically reclusive Gruner—and that each night, the island is overrun by humanoid killer amphibians. He and brutish Gruner—who has tamed a "toad" of his own—join forces, killing monsters by night and fornicating with Gruner's pet by day.

The film can go one of two ways: An all-out monster horror film complete with killer, humanoid amphibians and a man's descent into isolated insanity; or a brooding psychological allegory of human connectedness and brutality as the main character begins to identify more with the creatures more than himself -- and those creatures just so happen to also be killer, humanoid amphibians. The former seems to be more in-line with Slade's previous work, hyperbolic and all a bit on-the-nose, but this is all just conjecture right now. But one thing's for certain - we'll at least have killer, humanoid amphibians. And that's exciting, right?

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