Indie Wire reports the controversial Danish film director Lars von Trier -- whose sexually explicit "Nymphomaniac" split critics this year -- plans to make a horror film in Detroit.

Working title: "Detroit."

"It takes place in Detroit, and then there is the wordplay between 'Detroit' and 'destroyed,'" Kristian Levring, a von Trier associate, told the Danish magazine Soundvenue, according to Indie Wire.

Von Trier is an avant-garde director whose films' content has included what critics have called "his-and-her mangled genitalia," a donkey killed for food and pornography designed for women.

Levring said that von Trier began writing the Detroit film about a month ago.

"It’s about a man fighting his inner demons," he said. "That doesn’t tell that much, but that’s because we haven’t gotten any further so far."

However, he added that "it’s real horror. Of course, there is a psychological aspect, but it’s a real horror movie. That’s what we’re aiming for, at least."

Von Trier shocked the film world in 2011 when, at the Cannes Film Festival for the premiere of his "Melancholia," he announced, "I'm a Nazi" and that he "understands Hitler." He later said he was joking in a style of humor that is common in Denmark.

He also jokingly claimed he was writing a four-hour-long hardcore porn film featuring "Melancholia" stars Charlotte Gainsbourg and Kirsten Dunst, the Guardian reported. It would, he said, contain "a lot of very, very unpleasant sex."

His film "Antichrist" scandalized Cannes in 2009, and went on to win the best actress prize for Charlotte Gainsbourg, was the director's very twisted take on torture porn horror a la "Saw," says Indiewire. The film, which includes sexually explicit content, also stars Willem Dafoe.

His 1990s television mini-series "The Kingdom" also played tribute to American horror movies.

In 2000, von Trier released "Dancer in the Dark," a musical, shot in raw, jumpy digital video, that the New York Time called "both stupefyingly bad and utterly overpowering" and "a fascinating exercise in brutality, mitigated by the otherworldy charisma (and the music) of the Icelandic pop star Bjork."

Von Trier's company also has done porn films.

According to Wikipedia, his pornish "Constance "(1998), "Pink Prison" (1999) and the adult/mainstream crossover-feature "All About Anna" (2005), were made primarily for a female audience, and were extremely successful in Europe, with the first two being directly responsible for the March 2006 legalizing of pornography in Norway.

In July 2009, German Cosmopolitan ranked "Pink Prison" No. 1 in its Die Besten Frauenpornos -- the best women's porn -- calling it the "role model for the new porn-generation." It plot revolves around a female journalist who penetrates a prison to interview a secretive warden and has a number of erotic adventures along the way.

In 2007, the German magazine Stern wrote:

"Women too like to see other people having sex. What they don't like is the endless close-ups of hammering body parts without a story. Lars von Trier is the first to have realized this and produced valuable quality porn films for women."

Earlier this year, though, the New York Times, raised the issue of von Trier's treatment of women, saying, "accusations of misogyny are routine in discussions of filmmaker's work."