Thanks to the producing powers of famed guitarist Slash, Variety reports that Rebekah Brandes (Bellflower) has acquired a primary role in Nothing to Fear, the inaugural film from the former’s new production company, Slasher Films. She’s joining a cast that already includes Anne Heche, Clancy Brown, Ethan Peck, and James Tupper, and one that Anthony Leonardi III will make his directorial debut with.

Being a little horror picture, Fear centers on a family trying to start a new life in a small Kansas town, only to find out that their home is one of the seven gateways to hell. In the lineup, Tupper is the fictional family’s patriarch, Heche the mother, and Brandes their daughter; Brown has been hired to play “a charismatic but emotionally conflicted man of the cloth.” Now that the main cast has been, far as I can tell, mostly assembled, production on Nothing to Fear should get going in the relatively near future.

Moving from fictional scares into real-life tragedy, THR has a couple of casting additions for Fruitvale, a drama that, last night, we learned was trying to pull in Octavia Spencer and Michael B. Jordan (Chronicle). With those two having been confirmed the next day, it’s said that Melonie Diaz (Hamlet II) and Jordan‘s Wire and Red Tails co-star, Tristan Wilds, are now locked to appear.

Fruitvale is based on the story Oscar Grant, a young man killed on New Year’s Day of 2009 when police detained him following a public, physical altercation; the actual film, meanwhile, will seemingly follow him as he “crosses paths with friends and enemies, family and strangers on his last day.” Among those just cast, Diaz will play his child’s mother; Wilds has been cast as his best friend.

Produced by Forest Whitaker and written & directed by Ryan Coogler, Fruitvale will begin shooting in July.

Has either film been of relative interest to yourself? What does this casting do for that feeling?