Sure, Whitley Strieber went off the deep end a couple of years ago, getting heavily – scary heavily – into the world of alien abductee fantasy. But just because the man’s personal beliefs have become escalatingly weirder and weirder doesn’t mean that the guy behind Wolfen and The Hunger can’t still spin a crackerjack yarn. Hell, if you just approach Communion as fiction I bet you’ll be wildly entertained instead of fairly mortified*.
Strieber hasn’t given up his extra-terrestrialism, even as The X-Files have come and gone. And maybe the time is right for a resurgence of alien abduction stories. At least Joel Silver and his Dark Castle production shingle are hoping so; they’ve optioned a comic book Strieber created, The Nye Incidents. This fictional story – supposedly based on real events – is about… well, let me have the product description at Amazon do the work for me:
Lynn Devlin is a medical examiner who thinks she has seen everything
Nye County has to throw at her. She copes with methodical, rational
logic. But when a grotesque murder of a supposed alien abductee occurs
that cannot be solved with her scalpel and microscope, Lynn finds her
detachment is shattered, and her dreams haunted by large, dark,
oval-shaped eyes. Now, only one thing is certain: There’s a killer
loose in the alien abductee community… human or otherwise!
The film is being directed by Todd Lincoln, who has been developing the comic book adaptation Hack/Slash (along Dan Alter, who is also producing The Nye Incidents as well as Jonny Quest). Todd’s a really good guy, and I’m excited to see what he can do with Strieber’s concept.
* it is here that I must say that in the 80s and 90s I was big into UFOs and for a while was pretty convinced of the reality of alien abduction. Over the years it became obvious just how crazy many of these people were, especially as their already credulity stretching stories just kept getting weirder and weirder. In the end I found myself liking a lot of the theories put forward by Jacques Vallee; although also weird, they at least account for being weird.