Last week some pretty big news was announced (read the story) as Room 101 and Vertigo Entertainment teamed up to produce The Colony. While the idea of these two big horror companies teaming up was cool, no details were revealed about Stacy Title and Jonathan Penner’s screenplay – not even a drop. We made a few phone calls and got in touch with Penner who talks a bit about the project, along with a book he co-authored with Room 101’s Steven Schnieder. Read on for the story.
“Stacy [Title] and I are really psyched about THE COLONY and would love to tell everyone everything but we’ve been asked not to reveal any plot details,” Jonathan Penner tells Bloody-Disgusting. “It’s a pretty big idea, which we’re trying to do in a fairly contained way.”

While the duo were sworn to secrecy, we were able to get minor some details from them.

“It’s set on the West Coast and centers on a family” Penner tells us. “We’re trying to write something for the whole family, but not soft – we’re shooting for a JAWS or SIGNS level of scares – so enough blood and gore to not cheat, but really character-based.” He continues, “This idea just seemed like the simplest, scariest version we could come up with. We want to put some stuff on screen that you’ve never seen before, but have it be essentially real.”

We also chatted a bit about working with Steven Schneider of Room 101.

“We met Steven a couple of years ago and have been working with him on a horror show for AMC called BURIED. He literally wrote the book on horror; we’re all New Yorkers and we just hit it off immediately. We all came up with what we thought was a pretty cool idea for how to do horror on TV – so we’ve been working on that with him there; and he just introduced us to Gabriel over at Vertigo who is so smart we immediately wanted to work with him too. I guess Participant had an idea to do something in the genre and where they wanted to be, and together we just all came up with THE COLONY pretty quickly and sold it to them. The script isn’t finished yet, but ideally this should be a high-end horror adventure.”

We also were told that Penner and Schnieder recently turned in the manuscript for a co-authored book, THE HORROR FILM, that Taschen will be publishing later this year.

“Yeah, another one of Steven’s brainstorms! He edits those 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die books, among others, and he sold Taschen on a book about Horror Cinema. We wrote it together. It’s hard to cram the entire genre into 40,000 words, but it was so much fun to do. We’re both huge Famous Monsters fans, of course, and I grew up loving the Dennis Gifford books, Carlos Clarens, William K. Everson and the Phil Hardy Encyclopedia. Then of course Michael Weldon… anyway, just to be a part of that and get my own two-cents worth in on the movies I love is a thrill…and to do it for Taschen where they make the most beautiful, sexy books out there, well it was a fanboy’s dream come true. It just went to the printer and I think is out for Christmas and Chanukah! ”

If that’s not enough cock teasing for one day, I don’t know what is. We’ll try and keep our ears close to this project and get more details as the gag order is released.