‘Kill List’ Director Ben Wheatley To Create Dystopian Condominium in J.G. Ballard’s ‘High Rise’

By  · Published on August 29th, 2013

Imagine the greatest apartment complex anyone could possibly dream up. It’s got its own self-contained schools, grocery stores, and every modern amenity you’d ever need. What if this building was so convenient that you never had any reason to leave? Bottled up in one place forever, would the tenants create a utopia or would they descend into “Lord of the Flies”-esque madness and begin slaughtering, and even eating, their friends and neighbors?

That’s the idea at the center of J.G. Ballard’s 1975 novel, “High Rise.” Folks have been trying and failing to adapt it into a film for the past several decades- Nicolas Roeg (Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth) nearly made it in the 1970s, while Vincenzo Natali (of Cube and Splice) was the latest director to fall just short of directing an adaptation.

But an adaptation is finally coming together. Screen Daily reports that Ben Wheatley, director of Kill List, will be the one to finally put Ballard’s novel up on the big screen. Wheatley may not be a sci-fi wiz like the last two directors attached to High Rise, but Kill List has enough horror elements to it (and all of them committed by regular old human beings) that it’s safe to say the project is in good hands. Let’s just hope it can weather the storm of The Raid comparisons, which have become commonplace for any movie set in an apartment complex.