Prevenge and Timestalker filmmaker Alice Lowe has lined up two genre projects, including a horror version of the William Shakespeare classic A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The second project, Deadline reports, is Sprites, a dark comedy horror about a little girl joining a girl guide group. Lowe will write, direct, and play a key role in both.

Shakespeare’s classic comedy stageplay centered around the wedding of Duke Theseus of Athens and the Amazon queen Hippolyta, set in a woodland fairyland where identities get crossed and romantic entanglements get comically messy. 

Lowe aims to lean into the strangeness of it all. The filmmaker told Deadline, “I wanted to make a classic, and it struck me that Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I know so well, is always made in the same way over and over. It’s so genuinely funny. But also fey and fairies and blah blah blah. But I don’t see why it couldn’t be revisited with how terrifying and odd everything happens in it, and how the undercurrents are actually so dark and strange.”

Comedy will also play a driving role in Lowe’s original project, Sprites.

“The film in some ways is autobiographical. It’s set in the early 80s, which is a period that fascinates me. It’s a time when things were rapidly changing and I think the onset of the individualism that is today the mainstay of our psyches and society at large. It was also a confusing time, for me, because I was an actual child! But I also see it as a transition between the trust in the monarchy, authority, in the church, in religion, in the community and into something more formless and self-centred. Sort of liminal. You only have to look at Jimmy Savile and how he slipped through the cracks to see how there was a perception or culture shift,” Lowe said.

Both are part of a two-picture deal with UK production company Western Edge Pictures. Stay tuned.