tMF | The Movie-Fanatic

What I've realised since we finished the film is that it is a horror lover's geeky teenage fantasy. That's because it takes an unpopular geek outsider at school and imagining that he is Freddy Krueger or Jason from Friday the 13th, or Michael Myers from Halloween. He's a vengeful geek who comes back with supernatural powers to kill the people who bullied him. In that sense it's a reinvention of those films that I was weaned on in the '80s.

That's director Jon Wright answering a question about his new horror film, Tormented.The movie is to open on the 22nd of this month (that's Friday!) in the UK and stars Alex Pettyfer, Dimitri Leonidas, Calvin Dean and Olly Alexander, among others.

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Wright was also asked about whether horror films can make directors more ambitious with their visuals...

I love fantasy in cinema. I think there's a tradition in England, which would be epitomised by someone like Andrea Arnold or Mike Leigh or Ken Loach, for something that's more gritty and realistic, but I'm very much into fantasy, science fiction and horror; imaginative cinema that has nothing to do with real life. So, for me, one of the really fun things about Tormented was being able to play with CG and other visual effects, makeup effects and sound design, and create an 'unrealistic' style that you can't get away with in other genres. Obviously it was a low-budget movie and our budget was stretched to breaking point, but I think a lot of the effects have turned out really well.

Movie synopsis, cast and crew and more after the jump.

Here's the synopsis: Tormented, a sexy, scary high school horror movie that smells like teen spirit...with a hint of rotting flesh! From classrooms and cafeterias, to school ties and pool parties, teenage traumas full of promise, pimples and panic get a terrifying makeover as the best days of your lives become your worst nightmare.

Justine Fielding (Tuppence Middleton) is the gorgeous head girl of her plush suburban grammar school Fairview High. She has just won a place at Oxford University when In-Crowd hunk Alexis (Dimitri Leonidas) asks her out on a date.

All seems perfect.... except that Alexis and his circle of friends aren't quite as hip and glam as they seem. Underneath the clique's ‘too cool for school veneer' lurks a pack of vicious peer pressure tormentors who find it vastly amusing to persistently tease anyone they consider worthless losers. Their main target Darren Mullett (Calvin Dean) knows what his classmates did last summer. They bullied him to death. The overweight, asthmatic nerd was so relentlessly victimized by their cruel taunts, website intimidation and ‘happy slapping' mobile phone recordings he committed suicide.

But death is not going to stop Darren finally finding the courage to stand up for himself. With nothing left to lose, he takes murderous revenge on his former classmates in increasingly brutal, bloody and imaginative ways. And the In-Crowd soon discover to their horror there is no point reasoning with a very angry zombie ghost.

Trailer for the movie is below:

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On Alex Pettyfer: tMF received a lot of flak for featuring young actor Alex Pettyfer, saying he's not at par with the other younbg actors we feature regularly (like Tom Sturridge, Robert Pattinson, Gaspard Ulliel). But I still believed that given the right role and handled by a good director, Pettyfer can be a good character actor. After Wild Child, Tormented is Pettyfer's new film feature to prove his critics wrong...

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Says Pettyfer:

When a guy bullies another guy, he'll hit him and push him around, whereas two girls will just be bitchy to each other and be thinking how they could make the other feel bad about themselves. I got a little bit bullied after I did Tom Brown," adding: "But I left school when I got Stormbreaker ready for the world."

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On Dimitri Leonidas: Says the movie's official blog-

A child actor, Dimitri started his career in TV long running series such a Casualty, Holby City and The Bill. He later went on to play Josh Irvine in the BBC’s hugely popular series Grange Hill.

See more of the movie, the cast and crew and more at the official movie blog.