9 JG Ballard Stories That Must Be Filmed

Celebrating the life of Britain's late, great author

Apr 20th 2009 By Sam Ashurst

Zone Of Terror (1960)

The Star: Christian Bale

The Director: Christopher Nolan

The Pitch: Fancy Fight Club meets The Machinist? Then Zone Of Terror is the short story for you.

Zone’s protagonists are Larsen and Bayliss, two employees of a futuristic electronic recreational centre for corporate executives.

When Larsen has a breakdown recreating the central nervous system electronically (seriously), Bayliss sends him away to a partially abandoned complex of chalets, where Bayliss himself lives.

Larsen starts to feel better, until he is presented with a hallucination of himself outside of his chalet, picking up a book he’s just put down.

Larsen decides he is seeing a vision of himself in the past and becomes paranoid that Bayliss has induced the hallucination.

Our hero embarks on a voyage of discovery that would allow Nolan to tap into every talent he acquired on the set of The Prestige (2006) and would see Bale stretching all of his buffest acting muscles.

Comments

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- alowe
  
  Apr 20th 2009, 13:12
  
  Cocaine Nights, too, please. First shot: tennis machine pumping out balls. Pull back slowly to reveal a player in tennis whites, lying dead on the floor in a growing pool of tennis balls.
  
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- MadMatt
  
  Apr 20th 2009, 18:28
  
  Natali has been struggling to get High-Rise made for years - probably because he wants to make it as bleak and darkly brilliant as you suggest. He's a perfect fit and seriously underrated, so I hope that one at least makes it to the screen.
  
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- chris999
  
  Apr 25th 2009, 0:00
  
  By the way, it's Heavenly Creatures - not Heavenly Girls.
  
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- chris999
  
  Apr 25th 2009, 0:00
  
  By the way, it's Heavenly Creatures - not Heavenly Girls.
  
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- jargonking
  
  Apr 26th 2009, 18:38
  
  You're forgetting Hello America, possibly the most cinematic of all his novels featuring a European expedition to explore an America abandoned by it's population more than a century earlier. The opening scene of the ship arriving in an empty New York is phenomenal.
  
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