'The White Lotus' actor Theo James has been cast in Stephen King's 'The Monkey', which is being made by a team including horror icon James Wan.

OSLO, Norway & LAKE TAHOE, Nev.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 30, 2023--

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More horror films that parody our favourite childhood characters are on their way. The childhood tales of Winnie the Pooh, Peter Pan (Red Shadow Studios) and Cinderella (ChampDog Films) are getting a terrifying transformation as a result of the stories being part of the public domain. It comes after the controversial Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey movie that was panned by critics but was commercially successful. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Now, two new parody horror films are underway that spoof everyone's favourite golden bear and the boy who never grew up, Variety reported. And if the titles are anything to go by - Winnie the Pooh: Death House and Peter Pan Goes to Hell - they're certainly not suited to younger audiences... First up, we're getting another Pooh-based horror with Winnie the Pooh: Death House which has been described as The Strangers meets The Purge. It will be directed by S.J. Evans (Dead of the Nite), the film's storyline involves "an unexpected school reunion in a remote country mansion – an event orchestrated by members of a cult who were mercilessly tormented by the guests as children. Now, years later, they’re out for gruesome revenge." "The script is supremely clever with scope for iconic visuals, and we have assembled a terrific young cast loaded with star potential. I’m very excited to share this dark and disturbing horror with the world," Evans said. Meanwhile, Peter Pan Goes to Hell, written by Adam Stephen Kelly and directed by Phil Claydon is said to be in the vain of horrors such as Psycho and Nightmares in a Damaged Brain. Although, there is not much information about the plot Claydon did provide some insight and shared his excitement for the film "I grew up on a healthy diet of low-budget horror from the masters like Sam Raimi, Wes Craven and Peter Jackson," he said. "In recent streamer times, opportunities to create high-concept horror on a small budget had vanished so I relished the opportunity to dive on board with Red Shadow Studios in carving out an environment for filmmakers to come and craft some grassroots scares. Let the mayhem commence." "The huge interest in horror movies based on public domain properties piqued my interest as it did many, but with Red Shadow Studios – in partnership with Dolphin Medien – I’m trying to bring together really talented filmmakers and high-caliber actors as I firmly believe that, in this space, budget doesn’t have to mean compromising on talent or creativity," Kelly added, describing the two films as "absolutely ‘out there’ gonzo takes on beloved children’s stories." Along with this, Cinderella is set to have a 'horror-fication' with the film Cinderella’s Curse being for sale at AFM and ITN Studios are set to the film in October 2023, according to Bloody Disgusting. The film is set to be produced and directed by Louisa Warren and written by Harry Boxley and the cast includes Kelly Rian Sanson, Chrissie Wunna and Danielle Scott. “This an incredibly unique spin on the Cinderella we all love and know. There are going to be some truly horrific deaths by her hands," Warren to the publication “I think the gore hounds are in for a treat in my dark retelling.” Elsewhere, Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 is set to start filming this Autumn, Collider reported. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

'I’d been looked up and down, had people telling me what they thought of my body, since I was a teenager,' Britney Spears wrote in the memoir

By Lisa Richwine and Dawn Chmielewski LOS ANGELES (Reuters) -Hollywood's writers union said its members could return to work on

From arts and education to coups and annexations, there’s no doubt that Catherine the Great did more than history gives her credit for.

X most certainly marks the spot for the world’s most headline-grabbing billionaire. Elon Musk announced on Sunday that he would be giving Twitter a major makeover: changing its name to “X” and doing away with its famous bird logo. He tweeted (or should that be X-ed?): “Soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.” And, he said: “If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make go live worldwide tomorrow. To embody the imperfections in us all that make us unique.” Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter It’s all part of his overarching plan to transform X into an “everything app”, much like China’s WeChat, which handles everything from payments to messaging to micro-blogging. Posting a beaming photo of himself with his arms raised in a cross, Musk added: “Not sure what subtle clues gave it away, but I like the letter X.” So where does his love of the letter come from? And where else has he used it? Here, indy100 takes a look at the SpaceX founder’s somewhat unorthodoX obsession. X.com When it comes to letters of the alphabet, X is certainly the most associated with euphemism – anything branded X-rated is bound to raise an eyebrow or two. And this is quite possibly one of the reasons the proud provocateur liked it so much to begin with. According to Ashlee Vance, author of the 2015 biography ‘Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future’, his fascination with the letter began with one of his earliest ventures. Musk, one of the world's richest men, co-founded the online banking service X.com in 1999, but, Vance said, not everyone was enthusiastic about the name. "Everyone tried to talk him out of naming the company that back then because of the sexual innuendos, but he really liked it and stuck with it," he revealed. However, the critics were soon able to breathe a sigh of relief: X.com merged with competitor Confinity Inc., in 2000 and the name was changed to the family-friendly PayPal. And yet, Musk clearly wasn’t able to let go of his brainchild. So, in 2017, he bought the url "X.com" back off PayPal, tweeting that the domain "has great sentimental value,” as NPR notes. Now, if you type “X.com” into your web browser, you will be directed to the Twitter – soon to be X – homepage. SpaceX After making his first fortune with the sale of his tech company Zip2 for $307 million (around £240 million) in 1999, and PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion (around £1.32 billion), the universe was the limit for Musk. The same year he sold PayPal, he founded his space flight company Space Exploration Technologies Corp. However, the name doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, so it was abbreviated to SpaceX. The Tesla ‘X’ While Musk opted for three alternative consonants in the name of his electric car company (which he started in 2003), he eventually couldn’t resist adding a touch of X. In 2015, the father-of-six unveiled Tesla’s third model: an e-car lovingly named… you guessed it. Tim Higgins, author of ‘Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century’, explained that Musk had cheeky intentions when choosing the names of his models. The idea was that, combined, they would spell out the word “sexy," Higgins said. However, another car company – Ford – threw a spanner in the works thanks to its ownership of the rights to the “E” model. Musk, therefore, had to settle on calling his second model “3” – a "kind of a backwards E," as Higgins pointed out – to semi-achieve his desired acronym. But yes, there are now S, 3, X and Y models of the cars. Baby names In 2020, Musk and his then-partner, Grimes, welcomed a baby boy, calling him X Æ A-12. However, the couple were forced to alter the spelling of the name to X AE A-XII, after being notified that it breached legal conventions. California law dictates that names on birth certificates must employ “the 26 alphabetical letters of the English language,” although apostrophes and dashes are allowed, NME reports. Grimes, whose real name is Claire Boucher, explained via tweet that the X part of her son’s name refers to the “unknown variable” in algebra. Meanwhile, the Æ refers to the “elven spelling of Ai (love &/or Artificial intelligence)," and the A-12 at the end is apparently a nod to the Lockheed A-12 reconnaissance aircraft — the couple’s “favourite” plane. Despite all of this, the pair – who are now separated – refer to their child simply as “Little X”, Boucher admitted in an interview with Bloomberg shortly after his birth. Two years later, the then-couple announced that they’d had a baby girl via surrogate, naming her Exa Dark Sideræl. However, earlier this year, Boucher confirmed that they’d changed her name to “Y” – yet again proving that single letters at the bottom of the alphabet really are Musk’s thing. xAI On 12 July this year, the 52-year-old announced the formation of a new company called xAI. It's goal is simple, according to its website: "To understand the true nature of the universe." The new startup, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, has hired a group of top AI researchers who formerly worked at OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Tesla. But we don't know much more about it than that. Musk was a co-founder and early funder of the artificial intelligence research laboratory OpenAI. However, he's grown increasingly critical of the company as it’s gained global prominence and commercial success with last year’s release of ChatGPT. In April, the billionaire criticised ChatGPT in an interview with Tucker Carlson, telling the then-Fox News host that the chatbot had a liberal bias and that he planned an alternative that would be a “maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.” And... voilà xAI. What neXt? It’s time for the renaissance of X.com, but with a grand new purpose. Weeks before forking out the $44 billion (around £34 million) to buy Twitter in October, Musk tweeted that the eye-watering purchase was simply “an accelerant to creating X, the everything app". "He wants to create an app similar to how WeChat is used in China, where it's part of the fabric of day-to-day life,” the billionaire’s biographer Vance explained to NPR. “You use it to communicate, to consume news, to buy things, to pay your rent, to book appointments with your doctor and even to pay fines.” Hinting at the financial difficulties that have plagued Twitter both historically and since Musk’s acquisition, Vance pointed out: "The company clearly needs a new, bigger business if it's to make the type of money that would justify his investment and satisfy his ambition.” Indeed, the world-famous entrepreneur is doing everything he can to build the hype around his company’s new facelift. On Monday (24 July), he retweeted a message from his newly-appointed Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, which read: “It’s an exceptionally rare thing – in life or in business – that you get a second chance to make another big impression. Twitter made one massive impression and changed the way we communicate. Now, X will go further, transforming the global town square." She continued: “X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.” So… why X? Musk suggested that he’d chosen “X” to replace Twitter because he wanted something that “embod[ies] the imperfections in us all that make us unique”. The letter has a number of different spiritual, cultural and mathematical meanings – any, or all, of which may have informed his lifelong fascination with the letter. As Boucher noted in her baby name explanation, X connotes the “unknown variable” in algebra. It is, of course, also the symbol for multiplication, and in linguistics, it’s what’s known a “phonetic chameleon” – meaning that it’s used to replicate a number of different sounds. It is also known as signifying the end of something – or death – think the X in a skull and crossbones emblem or the crosses drawn on the eyes of the dead in cartoons. It also signifies an error or cancellation, or that which is negative, and has long been recognised as an occult symbol for Satan. In other words, it has become the most “nihilistic” of letters, as psychologist Leon F Seltzer pointed out in a piece for Psychology Today. This all goes to suggest that Musk appreciates X’s malleability – how it can be birth and death, cancellation and multiplication, nothing and everything. X.com is dead. Long live X.com. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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