Sucker Punch star Jena Malone is set to star in a psychological ghost-story thriller called Angelica, which is set to be directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein (Teeth, Happy Tears).
The movie actually sounds like it could be really good. It's based on a novel of the same name written by Arthur Phillips (Prague, The Egyptologist). The story is set in the 1880s, and Malone will play a character named Constance, "a young shop girl who falls for and marries Dr. Joseph Barton. After the difficult childbirth of their daughter Angelica, doctor-ordered celibacy creates a rift in the Bartons’ marriage and a ghostly force enters their home."
The movie was also describled as being a "sexually-charged supernatural mystery from multiple perspectives." So it has that going for it. I enjoy watching horror films, and Malone is a talented young actress, she most recently had a role in The History Channel's Hatfields & McCoys. Here's a more detailed description of the story...
From the bestselling author of The Egyptologist and Prague comes an even more accomplished and entirely surprising new novel. Angelica is a spellbinding Victorian ghost story, an intriguing literary and psychological puzzle, and a meditation on marriage, childhood, memory, and fear.
The novel opens in London, in the 1880s, with the Barton household on the brink of collapse. Mother, father, and daughter provoke one another, consciously and unconsciously, and a horrifying crisis is triggered. As the family’s tragedy is told several times from different perspectives, events are recast and sympathies shift.
In the dark of night, a chilling sexual spectre is making its way through the house, hovering over the sleeping girl and terrorizing her fragile mother. Are these visions real, or is there something more sinister, and more human, to fear? A spiritualist is summoned to cleanse the place of its terrors, but with her arrival the complexities of motive and desire only multiply. The mother’s failing health and the father’s many secrets fuel the growing conflicts, while the daughter flirts dangerously with truth and fantasy.
While Angelica is reminiscent of such classic horror tales as The Turn of the Screw and The Haunting of Hill House, it is also a thoroughly modern exploration of identity, reality, and love. Set at the dawn of psychoanalysis and the peak of spiritualism’s acceptance, Angelica is also an evocative historical novel that explores the timeless human hunger for certainty.