Hideo Nakata is set to direct a film called Chatroom next, which has me rather confused and disappointed, for Nakata had a couple of titles on his slate way back in September 2006 that had me genuinely excited, The Entity and Out, and both looked bumped for Chatroom as well as The Ring Three.

Chatroom is a psychological thriller about two teenagers who encourage each others destructive behaviour through a chatroom, an idea sounding like it's founded in the stories of people urging others to kill themselves in suicide chatrooms.

It's actually adapted from a stage play, and that hit me as a surprise when I read the story, a play written by the Irish playwright Enda Walsh who also adapted it for the big screen. He won the Cannes Camera d'Or in 2001 for his film Disco Pigs and recently wrote the script for the film about the IRA hunger strike entitled Hunger.

The founder of one of the film's sellers, WestEnd films, has described a little of the flavour of Chatroom through Variety:

“Nakata has come up with something very visual, very conceptual, and situated somewhere between 'Disturbia' and 'Cube,'”

Well that does sound interesting, but there's not much more on it. Perhaps we could push our resident stage expert Simone to find a little more out about the play.

However interesting it sounds, it does leave me wondering where Hideo Nakata's remake of The Entity has gone and where his adaptation of the excellent novel Out is. Both looked to be really strong projects, but neither are in production and not much progress has been heard about them for years.

On his slate however is The Ring Three, which by all accounts will be a prequel to the previous films and will show how Samara began her reign of terror through the video tape some thirty years before.

Perhaps he should have let the Ring series settle and move on with these other projects.