That scene, it turns out, was not as difficult to shoot as Wright had anticipated. "I'm not making a soft-porn movie or a hard-core porn movie, because I've got a rating that I have to obtain," he says. "I've got an obligation to the studio not to make a picture that's restricted. But, at the same time, I don't feel that it looks like we went out of our way to hold back. I mean, there's plenty of flesh in it. But there's also a lot of warmth, which I think is very surprising. People are always falling into each other's arms and kissing and hugging. There's a lot of cuteness about the film."

Jay Mohr as George Washington High's English teacher Leonard Marliston, to whom all the students - and especially Jody - turn to in their hour of need.

The only thing that did make the orgy scenes - and others in the film - slightly more difficult than they might otherwise have been, is that Cherry Falls was shot entirely on location, mainly in and around Richmond, provoking occasional mutterings from its good citizens, who somehow got hold of a rumour that Wright was making a teenage vampire film.

But, reckons the director, the slightly odd atmosphere of the Virginian capital turned out to be a definite plus. "This is the place where Edgar Allen Poe grew up," he says, "and I can see why it affected his thinking, his writing, because there's something kind of haunted about Richmond. And it's got a tragic history: it was the seat of the Confederacy and the Confederate rebellion - and it failed. It's also got strange smells and a lot of cigarette companies."

Plus, I point out, it is where all the Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta thrillers are set.

"Well, we actually shot some scenes in that morgue," says Wright. "We went down into the bowels of it and... what can I say? You don't want to die, mate! You just don't! If that's what they do with the bodies, you just don't want to die!"

Nor, of course, do the high-school kids of Cherry Falls, when confronted with the film's psycho-killer-with-an-agenda. But, believes Wright, in a strange kind of way, the killer is more on their wavelength than the film's adults, who all let them down in some way or another.

"I think there's a very interesting liberal streak in the movie," he jokes. "I think we have the first liberal psychopath in the history of the genre! All the others have been very conservative - that's the way I look at it. I mean, psychos in this kind of movie are very Reaganesque, as a rule. And what we have here is more of a Kennedyesque type of psycho!"

PHOTOS: Michael Tackett