Two Hollywood productions face being shelved indefinitely because their stories so grimly echo last week’s massacre on a university campus.

Distributors are refusing to touch the films Dark Matter, starring Meryl Streep, which is about an alienated Asian student who shoots fellow students and professors, or The Killer Within, about an American student who goes on a similar rampage.

They are wary of taking on films which bear striking parallels to the case of Cho Seung Hui, the Asian student who this month killed 32 students and professors at the Virginia Tech campus before turning his gun on himself in the worst single gun massacre in modern American history. One British distributor, who declined to be named, said: “These films are too close to the knuckle.”

The Virginia massacre marks a setback for studios that have invested millions of dollars in films that were inspired by earlier real-life massacres.

Dark Matter, in which Streep plays a university patron who tries to befriend the troubled student, took its inspiration from a 1991 tragedy in which a Chinese physics student opened fire in two buildings on the University of Iowa campus. He killed six people, including a student and professors.

Like Cho, he was a loner who felt persecuted. He apparently embarked on his killing spree after being told that his doctoral dissertation paper would not be chosen for a prize. One of his victims was the prizewinner; he then turned the gun on himself.

Just as the South Korean Cho bought his weapons weeks before his fatal shooting rampage, the Chinese student bought a .38-calibre revolver shortly before the killings. The Killer Within, a feature documentary directed by Macky Alston, traces the tragic story of Bob Bechtel who, at the age of 22, went berserk at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in the 1950s after being severely bullied.

Steven Zeitchik of Variety said that distributors were, not surprisingly, reluctant to take those films now.

“One potential distributor of Dark Matter is contemplating dropping out after the Virginia Tech shooting, and those that remain interested say they’d have to rethink their release strategy.”

Pam Rodi, an executive at Myriad Pictures, which produced Dark Matter, said: “We still believe in the movie and the story that it's telling. Hopefully a film like Dark Matter gets inside the mind of someone with these kinds of issues without glorifying them.”

The films’ makers will be hoping to stimulate interest by promoting it at the Cannes Film Festival next month.

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