Brittany Murphy as Jody Marken, the daughter of the sheriff
of Cherry Falls and the inevitable target for the psycho.

Nick Roddick talks to director Geoffrey Wright as he nears the end of filming an offbeat teen horror movie called Cherry Falls which, he says, boasts the genre's first liberal psychopath.

It's 6.30 in the morning in Richmond, Virginia, and Geoffrey Wright sounds like someone who has been up all night. This is not particularly surprising, because Wright has been shooting nights almost since production started on Rogue Pictures' movie, Cherry Falls, in the second week in March.

It is now the third week in April, however, and most of the night shoots have been done. "Another few days of nights," says Wright, starting a sentence which doesn't get any clearer as it continues, "and then a week or so of days."

The Australian-born director shot to international fame and notoriety with a 1992 film called Romper Stomper, about a group of neo-Nazi skinheads roaming the streets of Melbourne. Now he makes his American debut with Cherry Falls, a teenage high-school psycho-killer flick with quite a few differences, not least the climactic ball at which, for reasons which will be explained shortly, virtually the entire student body of George Washington High School set out to lose their virginity in a single night.

Developed by Los Angeles production house The Fresh Produce Company, Cherry Falls is only the second movie to go into production for Rogue Pictures, the genre division of top indie distributor - and recently production company - October Films (the other, already completed, is the hip-hop feature Trippin'). And Cherry Falls pretty much writes the book as far as alternative, cutting-edge, post modern - call it what you will - genre fare is concerned.

"There's enough idiosyncrasies and madness in the script to make you go 'Oh, well: this sequence is kind of interesting'," says Wright, "and that kept happening as I read it. I never felt it was like Urban Legend or anything like that. I mean, it's got ingredients that are reminiscent and standard within the genre, but they're really kind of superficial. There's so much else going on that it's just weird: it's full of idiosyncrasies. For starters, the film ends with an orgy, and I thought any American mainstream movie that ends with an orgy has to be worth making!"

Actually, the orgy - which happens at the abandoned (if appropriately named) Donkey Hill Hunting Lodge - is not quite the end of the movie: there is the obligatory scene in which the psycho gets his (or her: even the script hides the gender until the very end) just desserts, then appears to come back (but it was only a dream), until finally the teenage lovers - played by Brittany Murphy (who is soon to play Janis Joplin in Gary Fleder's Piece of My Heart) and Gabriel Mann - cuddle up in safety.