A couple of quick casting announcements:

  • Elijah Wood (The Lord of the Rings Trilogy) will produce and star in the horror picture, Cooties, from screenwriter Leigh Whannell (Saw).
  • Josh Duhamel (Transformers) is in negotiations to join You're Not You, starring Hilary Swank (Boys Don't Cry) and Emmy Rossum (The Day After Tomorrow), directed by Georce C. Wolfe (Nights in Rodanthe).

Hit the jump for more on both pictures. 

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First up from STYD comes word that Wood will not only produce Cooties, but will also star in it. Wood will produce through his new horror banner, The Woodshed, which recently announced a pair of films: Toad Road and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.  Written by Whannell and Ian Brennan (Glee), Cooties centers on a mysterious virus that infects an isolated elementary school and transforms the pre-teens into mindless savages.  An unlikely hero leads the surviving teachers in a fight for their lives against the students.  Whannell had the following to say:

"My friend Ian Brennan and I wanted to write a film about one of life’s most universal experiences – hatred for precocious, adorable children. And so we started work on ‘Cooties,’ a film about a virus that turns school children into monsters and therefore makes it okay to beat them up with hockey sticks."

Directed by Ace Norton (Rituals), production on Cooties is scheduled for April of 2013.

THR reported that Duhamel is in talks to star opposite Rossum in Wolfe's You're Not You, an adaptation of Michelle Wildgen’s book that “centers on an aimless and self-absorbed college student (Rossum) whose life is changed when she takes a part-time job caring for a woman (Swank) with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.”  Duhamel's next project is an adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel, Safe Haven, opposite Julianne Hough; the film opens February 8th, 2013.