UK production outfit Random Harvest has launched a new label to focus on horror and thriller titles aimed at the 16- to 21-year-old multiplex audience.

Dubbed Four Horsemen Films, Random Harvest is aiming to produce between three and five films per year through the label, and says that negotiations are at "an advanced stage" with a major studio for European distribution of all of the label's projects.

The first picture through Four Horseman is Octane, a teen thriller directed by Marcus Adams (Long Time Dead) and written by Stephen Volk, scheduled to start shooting in the UK in April. The film tells the story of a mother who suspects that the people who have lured away her rebellious teenage daughter are not who or what they seem.

Two further Four Horsemen Films productions are scheduled to shoot this year; LD50, about an idealistic group of young animal rights activists who break into a research facility to find that humans, not animals, are the subjects of experiments; and Dead Meat, about a young band on tour in Wales thrust into a battle between life and death when they discover that the local food chain has been contaminated, turning its human victims into violent psychopaths.

"The launch of Four Horsemen Films gives us a vehicle to deliver highly targeted feature films for the core multiplex market," said Random Harvest's joint managing director, Alistair MacLean-Clark. "We have built an extremely commercial slate of projects and developed a range of key marketing relationships that will carry us forward for the next two years."

Four Horseman's slate will be produced alongside Random Harvest's own commercially-driven projects. The company, based at the UK's Pinewood Studios, currently has twelve features in development.

Random Harvest was launched in 1998, and raised an initial£7.1m via two Enterprise Investment Scheme film funds in 1999/2000 - Harvest Pictures Plc and Harvest Pictures II. The company also struck a co-production agreement with BBC Films, stepping in to finance the BBC/Kismet production Born Romantic when finance from original backer Flashpoint failed to materialise.

Random Harvest's other credits include The War Bride, directed by Lyndon Chubbuck and starring Anna Friel, Brenda Fricker, Julie Cox, Loren Dean and Molly Parker.