Actresses Saoirse Ronan and Gemma Arterton have been set to star in the vampire drama Byzantium.

The story centers around a vampire mother who turns her only daughter into a vampire as well. They sometimes pose as sisters to lure in their victims. Saoirse Ronan and Gemma Arterton will play this deadly duo on screen.

Neil Jordan will direct Byzantium from an original screenplay by Moira Buffini, who recently wrote the Gemma Arterton drama Tamara Drewe. Production is set to begin in October from am $11 million budget.

Stephen Woolley will produce, and here's what he had to say about the project, which first came up when the producer revisited the Angela Carter novel The Company of Wolves.

"I love the horror genre and we've been working on this for three or four years. I sent it to Neil and he liked the script. We'd both recently revisited Angela Carter's book and it was just chance that when I called [Jordan], we were thinking along the same lines."