Writer/director/actor Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, the Hostel films) is getting used to being mistaken by people on the street for Sylar, the uber-bad guy from the hit TV series Heroes. At the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films' 2007 Saturn Awards to support his fellow filmmakers, Roth joked that he pretty much takes the 'Sylar' questions in stride and was even hoping to meet up with Zachary Quinto at the event.

Roth recently wrapped up Hostel Part II and is looking ahead to his next project, the big screen adaptation of Stephen King’s Cell. In King’s novel the world is overrun with zombies after cell phones emit a strange pulsating signal that scrambles the listener’s brains. Roth is producing and directing the film, but is not tackling the job of adapting King’s work himself. Instead, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, the screenwriters behind 1408 – another film based on a Stephen King story – are taking on that task.

“These guys are incredible, incredible writers,” said Roth. “It will be my first time doing that and there are a lot of things I want to try in my career. I've done three movies in a row that I've written and I've never made a movie that was written by someone else. I figured if I'm going to do that, do it from a book that I'm adapting. It is Stephen King's story and if there's stuff that I want to change, I can always change it and rewrite it.”

Roth definitely believes there are elements of King’s book that will have to be changed in order to tell the story in a feature film.

“Definitely, definitely. That was part of the agreement,” explained Roth. “I said I would only do it if I could actually adapt it and I am doing an adaptation of Cell. I'm not just filming the book. So there are things that are going to change. Obviously I want to keep intact what people love about the book and what I love about the book, but this will be my adaptation of Stephen King's book.”

Asked for specifics on what might need to be altered, Roth replied, “My feeling was the stuff that really captivated me was that first part of the book with the apocalypse. That's the kind of stuff that I want to expand on. We'll have certain other things, but I want to keep the tension of the first part of the book. The way the first part was so scary, I want to keep that tension throughout the whole film.”

And speaking of scary things, Roth believes it’s no longer necessary for horror fans to hide the fact they love the genre. “Yeah, I think that in a way, a few years back, you had things like wrestling kind of came out of the closet for lack of a better term. They had these MIT professors having Monday Night Nitro parties and it's like, 'Yeah, we all love the stuff. We know it's fake and we love it and we don’t care. We're enjoying it.' Suddenly everyone admitted they were wrestling fans. Then when X-Men came out, suddenly it was like Comic-Con was the big thing. It's like, 'Yeah, we all love comic books. It's just not a few geeks.' That's kind of what's happened with horror. Horror has really gone mainstream where a lot of people who before, horror's taboo because people think… It's like when you bring your friend to a horror movie and the movie's really disgusting. They look at you as if you're responsible. Like, ‘I didn't make that.’ Now everyone's saying, 'You know what? We all love this stuff. We know that it's fake. We know it's just storytelling. We love violent movies and let's enjoy them.' It's just a movie. We know it's fake.”

Saturn coverage contributed by Fred Topel.