French model-turned-actress Léa Seydoux is set to topline writer/director Christophe Gans’ dark re-imagining of the classic fairy tale Beauty and the Beast. The 26-year-old stunner will star opposite Black Swan’s Vincent Cassel in the Eskwad and Pathé production.

Seydoux is coming off the Tom Cruise blockbuster Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, in which she played a super-sexy, diamond-loving assassin. Additional creds include roles in Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.

Beauty and the Beast will roll camera in October. The film is Gans’ first directorial project since 2006’s creepy Radha Mitchell-starrer Silent Hill.

Universal Pictures’ remake of John Carpenter’s The Thing may have gotten the cold shoulder at the box office last year, but that isn’t keeping its star Mary Elizabeth Winstead from taking on more horror shows.

The 27-year-old looker has just signed on to star in director Daniel Stamm’s (The Last Exorcism) The Darkness, a loose adaptation of the Henry James novel “Turn of the Screw,” scripted by Megan Holley (Sunshine Cleaning).

The Darkness finds Winstead playing an American student, who while babysitting her tutor’s children in an English manor, comes to believe that they are being haunted by malevolent spirits. Production on the film will begin this summer in Europe.

Winstead will next be seen in director/producer Timur Bekmambetov’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Her creds include Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, Hideo Nakata’s The Ring 2 and the James Wong frighteners Final Destination 3 and Black Christmas.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead is part of Clatto’s list of The 20 Hottest Women Working In Horror/Sci-fi Today.