The book, Lord Of The Flies, has been a common read by William Golding, either by choice or by force, for many high school students. Upon reading the book, the plot revolves around British boys who are stranded on an uninhabited island and try to govern themselves with deadly results. There has been two remakes of the movie, the 1963 one and the 1990 one. However, that is about to change.

Recently, there was an excerpt published on September 7th, 2017, by The New Yorker detailing how the story would be with an all girl cast. In this remake, Ralph turns into Ralphy who is a vegetarian, Jack who is Jackie has been going to therapy because she keeps sabotaging new relationships, and Simon, who is Simone, fashioned a dress out of leaves. So far, the characters have been changed, but it yet has to be proven if the remake will stick to the plot.

Directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel have decided to make a remake of Lord Of The Flies, but with an all girl cast. Their aim is to tell a different side of the story that can only be accomplished with female roles. In a New York Times interview McGehee stated, “It breaks away from some of the conventions, the ways we think of boys and aggression.” With the directors being excited for the remake, others have voiced their disdain for it.

In a SFGATE article, Caille Millner writes about how girls are more proper and sophisticated in handling dangerous situations than boys. How girls would go for the “psychological kill” instead of the literal one. She even pokes fun at the idea by writing how the scenario would be in a cheerleading camp instead on an island.

People, along with Millner, are worried that the story will not be original using an all girl cast. In an undated interview that was published by the New York Times, the author, William Golding, who passed away on June 19, 1993, explained why he chose boys to be the main characters and not girls. He said, “ If you land with a group of little boys, they are more like scaled-down society than a group of little girls would be. Don’t ask me why, and this is a terrible thing to say, because I’m going to be chased from hell to breakfast by all the women who talk about equality. This has nothing to do with equality at all. I mean, I think women are foolish to pretend they’re equal to men — they’re far superior and always have been. But one thing you cannot do with them is take a bunch of them and boil them down, so to speak, into a set of little girls who would then become a kind of image of civilization, of society.”

Basically, the main characters are boys because they represent the reality of how society functions than with girls who will give a false image of society. He also said he knows that women are more superior than men, but that the book isn’t about equality but about the reality of society.

By Cassandra Reyes