What makes Cherry Falls so unusual for a horror movie is that sex makes the characters safe, since the psycho only targets virgins. "Usually, in horror films, it's the promiscuous kids that get murdered," says Wright. "In this movie, because virgins are being targeted - which is outrageous and absurd and ridiculous - people that have sex are safer."

And, yes, he's noticed - along with Entertainment Weekly - that virginity is the almost de rigueur subject matter for teen movies and TV these days (even Buffy recently decided to get it on, only to see her post-coital paramour morph into a vampire before her very eyes).

"My feeling is that often - and it's amazing how often it happens in Hollywood - you'll read one script which has a certain ingredient and all of a sudden you'll hear or pick up several of them," says Wright. "But there's a much weirder spin on this one. What I liked about it - and what I thought would always be a challenge - was the tone. It's a black, black, black comedy, but it's not a farce. It's supposed to be a teen horror film, and yet there's an awful lot of motivation involved for the central characters in doing what they do. It's not perfunctory at all."

Here and above, Brittany Murphy as Jody and Gabriel Mann as her boyfriend Kenny.

The script of Cherry Falls, written by Ken Selden (White Lies), is a deft combination of what the genre calls for - sudden shocks; sharp instruments; teen screams; camera-close-behind-the-heroine chases through darkened buildings - and some very offbeat elements, of which the psycho's habit of only targeting virgins is perhaps the most memorable.

The movie is set in the small Virginia town of the title - a peaceful, pretty little place with a nearby National Park and some vague connection to George Washington. The first two characters we meet - an engaging young couple called Rod and Stacy, he brimming with hormonal drive, she not quite ready to go all the way - don't outlive the opening sequence. Their murder spreads panic (plus, of course, the usual wise-ass remarks) among the local high-school kids. The main focus, though, is on Jody Marken (Brittany Murphy), daughter of the local sheriff - Michael Biehn, the good soldier-from-the-future in the original Terminator and his borderline alcoholic wife Marge (Candy Clark, who was the girl, 20 years ago, in The Man Who Fell to Earth) - and Jody's off-again-on-again relationship with fellow student, Kenny (Gabriel Mann). Matters are further complicated by a dark secret in the shared past of Sheriff Marken and high-school principal Tom Sisler (Joe Inscoe) - which turns out to have a lot to do with the recent murders. These, meanwhile, continue to multiply at the rate of one or two a night, until the kids decide that the only road to salvation is through sexual initiation. Hence the orgy.