This week’s I Love Dark YA Blogfest Challenge was to score and cast the movie version of one of your favorite Dark YA books.  I just couldn’t stop at one.

Before I start, I just have to quote Tessa over at Ink&Angst:

Tessa’s Definition of Dark YA
Life sucks, everybody dies, the end.

I know I already talked about The Chrysalids, but I’d just like to take this opportunity to say “WHY the heck hasn’t someone made a movie of this yet?” I’m hoping with the hype over The Hunger Games movie (have you seen the trailer?!), someone at Warner Brothers or Universal  will think to dust off this seminal dark YA.  The production company that made my film Hildegarde was once involved in developing The Chrysalids for film, though I don’t know what happened to that. That was years ago, when I was just starting out.

Anyway, I don’t know about a full sound track, but I always saw the opening credit sequence like this:

First, start listening to this: Tomorrow, by U2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFS_T8lXqwo

Now read:

We open on a lush green and ancient forest. Moving slowly through the gnarled vines and dense foliage, we escape suddenly to a steep cliff, below which waves are crashing wildly on the rocks. We venture over the ocean, gaining speed, until the waves and whitecaps blur below us.

Soon we reach another shore, but it is as unlike as where we started as possible. All is devastation, the cities that once stood are barely recognizable, and beyond them, endless fields of black burnt glass for mile after mile. (at about 2:47 in the song).

Eventually we reach more ruins, and deserted devastated countryside, until just as we fade out, things start to look alive again, but still, somehow sinister.

I just love the ancient Celtic sound of this track and to me it fits so well with the book. If I was to do a dream sound track for this film I would travel back in time to 1981 and get U2 to do it.

Marcus Yallow, the lead –  Logan Lerman from Percy Jackson. He’s cute but no so cute as to be unbelievable as a high school geek.

Darryl Glover – I’m not sure if this character is black, but his name makes him sound like Danny Glover’s son so I’m going with Tyler James Williams 

Vanessa Pak (Van) – Oh heck, why not Jenna  Ushkowitz? I love her Glee. I think she’d be great in this.

Jose Luis Torrez – it’s a bit tired and tidy having this kind of one of each color cast, especially with the white dude in the lead, but Jose is Jose after all so let’s go with Jake T Austin for amongst other reasons, the fact that he’s playing Huckleberry Finn as we speak.

Angela Carvelli (Ange) the love interest – Selena Gomez, might stretch her a bit out of her “nice girl” image.

God, how I LONG for Little Brother to be made into a movie. It’s dark, but not in an angsty suicidey way, or in a paranormal/post-apocalyptic/dystopian way. It’s dystopian all right, but it’s US, it’s NOW, look around people. This is real. Great book!

P.S. Don’t they look cute together?