14-year-old actor Chandler Riggs is best-known for playing creepy Carl Grimes on the wildly popular zombie apocalypse series The Walking Dead, but soon he'll play a kid terrorized by the living in the aptly titled home invasion thriller Home Invasion. THR reports Riggs and Ioan Grufudd of Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer have joined the cast that already included Shake It Up!'s Bella Thorne and Under The Dome's Natalie Martinez.
The foursome will play the family under attack in the feature. Bella and Riggs are set to play the children of Grufudd, while Martinez will play their stepmother. There's no word yet on who will play the home invaders.
Penned by up and coming screenwriter Joseph Dembner, Home Invasion follows this family's terrifying experience of being trapped in their own home by intruders who play a life-and-death game that's rules are unveiled as the night goes on. While this synopsis is decidedly vague it's hard not to hear "home invasion" and "life-and-death game" without thinking of Michael Haneke's 1997 and 2007 films Funny Games. Let's hope Home Invasion has something else in store as this is something we've already seen twice before.
Home Invasion will mark the feature directorial debut of commercial director Sean Carter. Voltage Pictures and Zinc Entertainment, a division of Silver Pictures, are backing Home Invasion, which will be executive produced by Joel Silver and Steve Richards, and Michael Fiore, who has been a long-time collaborator of the director. With the key cast announced, we assume production in this chilling pic will begin shortly. But for now no announcement regarding a start date has been made.
As Home Invasion's biggest "names" are child stars from television, it seems likely this will be a low-budget feature. Further support is the concept that allows for most if not all of the film to be shot in a single location. So expectations for how this thriller will fair at the box office are likely low. Still, it could prove a chance for each of these actors to get a bit more exposure.
Martinez, who has scored recurring roles in several TV dramas including Fashion House, Saints & Sinners, and CSI: NY has managed a string of supporting roles in crime dramas like The Baytown Outlaws, End of Watch and Broken City, but here she's a lead. Grufudd's best-known role to date is as Reed Richards in the Fantastic Four movies, which are so forgettable that their Human Torch got to upgrade to a bigger Marvel hero, Captain America.
Riggs is of course recognizable, being a regular on a hit series. But he's been working to break through in film, having recently wrapped on an independent horror-thriller called Mercy. As for Thorne, she's well-known by tweens for her portrayal of CeCe Jones on Disney Channel's kid show Shake It Up!, and she's set to appear in the movie adaptation of the beloved children's book Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. But with this part could begin breaking into more mature feature work.
