Deadline's Michael Fleming is reporting that director Bryan Bertino will be following up his debut on The Strangers (he wrote a script for The Strangers 2, but will not direct it) with the This Man, a film with a fascinating, potential-packed premise behind it. According to Fleming, the film is an adaptation of a web site Ghost House Pictures acquired from an Italian sociologist who, supposedly, created it as a global connection portal for people who claimed to have all seen the face of the man (pictured in the top right) in their dreams. The film, however, won't just be a chronicle of this sociologist's "discoveries", but about the man who has no idea that people the world over are seeing him in their nightmares.

The reason I sound doubtful as to the history of the project is because I don't think it's quite so fact-based as Fleming presents it to be. Jawbone.tv has a handy breakdown of when posts about This Man started to appear on the Internet as well as who registered ThisMan.org. Their registrant is the same "Italian sociologist" Fleming mentions, Andrea Natella. Granted he may actually be a sociologist, but Jawbone also pinned Natella as the director of an Italian guerrilla marketing company.

I don't really care if the story is fact-based or just the result of some clever viral marketing because I think the concept behind This Man is rock solid and ripe for speculation. I'm hoping it goes a little something like this: Strangers start to recognize the man on the street and as soon as he realizes it's because people are convinced they're having nightmares about him, he's led into a world where cults have risen in frightful devotion to him and people everywhere have him on their minds. His life starts to spiral out of control as his 'fans' come out of the wood-work and eventually he discovers it was all just a viral experiment on the Internet and that he happened to have a face that was generic enough to look like the generic face an Italian marketer/sociologist chose for his little experiment.

Again, I have no idea if that's actually what the script is about, but that's where I would go with it-- and getting people to speculate on the vaguest of details is a great sign that you've got the potential for something great on your hands. It doesn't hurt, either, that Bryan Bertino's first film managed to transform a predictable script into something that was legitimately creepy (thanks in no small part to an outstanding sound design). Here's hoping his team-up with Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert's production shingle refines those talents even more.

More importantly, however...has anyone out there actually seen this man in their dreams?