Scott “Kid Cudi” Mescudi is directing, writing, starring in and scoring Wrong Number, a stalker thriller shooting now in Los Angeles. Deadline broke the news on September 11. Barbie Ferreira co-stars.
That is four credits on one picture. It is also only his second time behind a camera.
Mescudi plays Ibn, a solitary self-help author whose romance with an enigmatic woman named Eliza curdles into something far worse. He is stalked by someone he cannot see, and he is implicated in a string of murders. Ferreira plays Eliza. Lucy Barrett, Dewayne Perkins, Clifton Powell and Laura Harrier round out the cast, with Mad Solar producing.
The One He Said Would Be Gnarly
This is the film he told everyone was coming. Back in August, Deadline reported that Mescudi was already lining up a follow-up to his directorial debut before that debut had opened, and the word he used for it was gnarly. It had no title then, and no cast. It has both now, plus a Los Angeles shoot.
The debut in question is Doe, an addiction drama he wrote, directed and stars in, which Deadline unveiled in April. So Wrong Number is his second feature as a director, and it is going in front of cameras before audiences have seen his first one. That is an unusual amount of confidence for a filmmaker two movies deep, and it is the kind of pace that usually belongs to someone who has been storyboarding in his head for years.
He has not been quiet about why. “A lot of people know that I’m a huge horror buff,” Mescudi told Deadline. “And it was only a matter of time before I’d jump into the genre myself.” He also promised, with fewer syllables, that there will be blood.
Where You Know Barbie Ferreira From
Ferreira is not a newcomer to this. She led Daniel Goldhaber’s Faces of Death reimagining opposite Dacre Montgomery, which put a notorious piece of video-nasty history through an internet-era filter and reached theaters this past April. Casting her as the mysterious woman at the center of a stalker picture is a director who has watched her work, not one who has read her name.
Harrier is best known as Liz Allan in Spider-Man: Homecoming and for Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, which makes Wrong Number her first real step into straight horror. Powell has spent three decades as one of the most reliable character actors working. Perkins comes out of comedy, which in a stalker film is rarely an accident.
Why the Score Credit Matters
The detail worth sitting with is the music. Mescudi is writing the score himself, and horror has always rewarded the directors who did that. John Carpenter built half his reputation on it. Mica Levi turned Under the Skin into something people still argue about. A stalker movie lives or dies on tension the audience feels before it can name it, and tension is mostly sound.
Mescudi has been scoring rooms for the better part of two decades. Whether that translates to scoring a scare is the open question, and it is the most interesting thing about this production.
No distributor and no release date have been announced. The film is shooting now.
