Aussie thesp Eric Bana is in talks to join Scott Derrickson's paranormal police thriller Beware the Night from a script that he co-wrote with Paul Boardman.
Derrickson (Day the Earth Stood Still) who has found better success in the low budget world with the forthcoming buzz-earning Sinister will be delivering this project in the form of a supernatural story where an NYC policeman investigates demons and other things of a terrifying nature.
Mark Wahlberg was offered the same lead role, but he's decided not to join the film, which is a co-production with Jerry Bruckheimer's company and Disney.
The script is based on a true-crime thriller written by Ralph Sarchie and Lisa Collier Cool, which recounts tales of the NYPD's close encounters with the unexplained.
Bana, last seen in Deadfall and The Time Traveler's Wife, is currently shooting Peter Berg's Last Survivor (with Wahlberg), and will next be seen in legal terrorism thriller Closed Circuit, Elvis & Nixon and By Virtue Fall.
Here's the book description I pulled from the Amazon listing:
A sixteen-year NYPD veteran, Ralph Sarchie works out of the 46th Precinct in New York's south Bronx. But it is his other job that he calls “the Work”: investigating cases of demonic possession and assisting in the exorcisms of humanity's most ancient–and most dangerous–foes. Now he discloses for the first time his investigation into incredible true crimes an inhuman evil that were never explained, solved, or understood except by Sarchie and his partner. Schooled in the rituals of exorcism, and an eyewitness to the reality of demonic possession, Ralph Sarchie has documented a riveting chronicle of the inexplicable that gives a new shape to the shadows in the dark.
In Beware the Night, he takes readers into the very hierarchy of a hell on earth to expose the grisly rituals of a Palo Mayombe priest; a young girl whose innocence is violated by an incubus; a home invaded by the malevolent spirit of a supposedly murdered ninteenth-century bride; the dark side of a couple who were literally, the neighbors from hell; and more. Ralph Sarchie's NYPD revelations are a powerful and disturbing documented link between the true-crime realities of life and the blood-chilling ice-grip of a supernatural terror.
Maybe there's hope for Beware the Night yet. More as it drops.
Source: The Wrap
