KATALIN VARGA Director Peter Strickland Enters The BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO

God bless this current mini-resurgence of giallo inspired films. It brought us Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani's stunning Amer and now Peter Strickland - the acclaimed director of Katalin Varga - is getting in on the act as well.

Now in production, Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio promises to be a Lynchian twist on the genre with the action set in a sound studio hired out to record audio on all variety of cheap exploitation film. Here is how it is described by international sales company The Match Factory:

Berberian Sound Studio is one of the cheapest, sleaziest post-production studios in Italy. Only the most sordid horror films have their sound processed and sharpened in this studio. Gilderoy, a shy and nondescript sound engineer from the UK is hired to mix the latest giallo film by horror maestro, Santini and he soon finds himself caught up in a forbidding world of bitter actors, capricious foley artists and confounding bureaucracy. The longer Gilderoy spends mixing screams and the bloodcurdling sounds of hacked vegetables, the more homesick he becomes for his garden shed studio in Dorking. His mother's letters alternate between banal gossip and an ominous hysteria, which gradually mirrors the black magic of Santini's film that Gilderoy is responsible for orchestrating. As both time and realities shift, Gilderoy finds himself lost in an otherworldly spiral of sonic and personal mayhem.

I had a chance to see a pre-production mood reel Strickland shot for this last year and let me say that it looks absolutely stunning.