Casting Chuck Palahniuk's Lullaby?

When we last talked to Chuck Palahniuk at Sundance, he told us that a big screen adaptation of Lullaby was set up with a Swedish director he met named Rolf Johansson, who had one more year to get the film into production. Now according to our friends at Film School Rejects who recently spoke to Chuck, Johansson has since secured funding and is currently in the casting stage.

Not much else is known at this time. I'm assuming that the film will be another low budget production like Choke. Actually, I'm not even sure if this Rolf Johansson guy exists. I can't seem to find any information about the guy outside of the few times Chuck has dropped his name in interviews. Does anyone have any concrete information on this director or the development of this project? Please email us.

At one point Fight Club director David Fincher admitted to MTV that he was "pretty interested in Lullaby" but that it would have to "be dumbed down a bit to work as a movie." Haven't read Lullaby? Here is the official plot description:

"Ever heard of a culling song? It's a lullaby sung in Africa to give a painless death to the old or infirm. The lyrics of a culling song kill, whether spoken or even just thought. You can find one on page 27 of Poems and Rhymes from Around the World, an anthology that is sitting on the shelves of libraries across the country, waiting to be picked up by unsuspecting readers.

Reporter Carl Streator discovers the song's lethal nature while researching Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, and before he knows it, he's reciting the poem to anyone who bothers him. As the body count rises, Streator glimpses the potential catastrophe if someone truly malicious finds out about the song. The only answer is to find and destroy every copy of the book in the country. Accompanied by a shady real-estate agent, her Wiccan assistant, and the assistant's truly annoying ecoterrorist boyfriend, Streator begins a desperate cross-country quest to put the culling song to rest.

On one level, Lullaby is a chillingly pertinent parable about the dangers of psychic infection and control in an era of wildly overproliferated information: "Imagine a plague you catch through your ears... imagine an idea that occupies your mind like a city." But it is also a tightly wound thriller with an intriguing premise and a suspenseful plot full of surprising twists and turns. Finally, because it is a Chuck Palahniuk novel, it is a blackly comic tour de force that reinforces his stature as our funniest nihilist and a contemporary seer."

I'm really hoping for a  Survivor movie, but for now I'd be more than willing to settle for Lullaby.