At the currently running Fantasia festival in Montreal, Fango got a chance to sit down with actress/producer Jennifer Blanc-Biehn (pictured), who was there with her husband Michael Biehn for the Canadian premiere of Xavier Gens’ THE DIVIDE, in which he stars. Blanc-Biehn gave us the scoop on a couple of genre names who have just joined her new horror project, AMONG FRIENDS, and other info on the movie.

AMONG FRIENDS, which we previously reported on here, grew out of Blanc-Biehn, actress Danielle Harris (who’s making her feature directorial debut on FRIENDS) and writer Alyssa Lobit’s previous collaboration on Biehn’s directorial debut THE VICTIM. “I really enjoyed both producing and acting in that,” Blanc-Biehn tells Fango. “Danielle and I really have fun working together; we’re best friends and we have a super connection. So I wanted to do something else with her, and I wanted to work again with Alyssa, who got a bit of acclaim at festivals for a film she did called THE THINGS WE CARRY—not a genre piece at all. I basically said to her, ‘I want to keep producing, I want to do something fast, let’s get something else off the ground.’ She’s an incredible writer, and she said, ‘I have an idea; it’s not usually what I write, it’s very out-there,’ and I said, ‘Write it, write it, let me see it!’ I read it, loved it and showed it to Danielle, and the two of them started collaborating. I was also involved in tweaking it, but I have to give the credit to Alyssa and then to Danielle, for story-editing and working with her on certain aspects. So here we are; we’re starting principal photography on the 29th.”

One of Biehn’s recent collaborators is involved as well, she reveals: “There’s a hallucination scene in AMONG FRIENDS where this one actress character starts seeing things; she thinks she’s in a movie, and watching it being filmed. There’s a director in it, and Xavier Gens has just agreed to play that role. We’re very excited that he’s going to come in and join us.”

In addition, “I just found out today that Kane Hodder’s going to be in it,” she says. Also joining previously announced AJ Bowen, Blanc-Biehn, Harris, Lobit, PROM NIGHT’s Brianne Davis, Dana Daurey and Kamala Jones in the cast are “a guy named Chris Meyer, and an actor named Christopher Backus, who is somebody to watch; he’s playing Marlene Dietrich in a movie [MY FAIR LIDY] right now, he’s got range [laughs]! We’ve basically got a lot of attractive people, a lot of sexual situations and a lot of gore in this one.”

That gore is shed during what Blanc-Biehn describes as “an ’80s-prom murder-mystery dinner that goes completely wrong. AMONG FRIENDS is the perfect title, because it’s sort of about the unraveling of these friendships by one crazy friend.” As for who will be creating the onscreen bloodshed, “Rob Hall did our gore in VICTIM, and if we’re lucky enough, maybe he’ll come and help us out; we’ll see. We’re trying to entice him with the script right now.”

With all the VICTIM alumni reteaming on AMONG FRIENDS, Blanc-Biehn says she’s nonetheless not worried that they’ll be repeating themselves. “That wasn’t really a concern for me,” she says, “though I’m positive it was a concern for Alyssa, because aside from her little role in THE VICTIM, she also helped produce our making-of video. She edited it; she’s a woman of many talents. So I’m sure she went to town on this, wanting to come from a completely different place, because she knows so intimately what the deal is with THE VICTIM that I’m sure she didn’t want to seem like she was copying it at all, especially since a lot of the same people are in it.” Keep your eyes here from more updates on AMONG FRIENDS as they come in!

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