Movies
‘Alive in Necropolis’ Gets Adapted in the Vein of ‘Chinatown’ or ‘Seven’!
A book about a city of graves could be getting new life on the big screen.
David Katzenberg and Seth Grahame-Smith (who are producing the new Beetlejuice movie) have picked up the movie rights to Alive in Necropolis, a noirish detective story set in the real-life cemetery-filled town of Colma, Calif, reports EW.
The 2008 debut novel of Doug Dorst focuses on a rookie cop who begins encountering restless souls while pounding the nighttime beat in the Northern California city. Colma is famous for being the Bay Area’s go-to place for burials, with 73 percent of its land dedicated to graveyards. About 1,600 people live there, while the underground population soars to around 1.5 million. (The town’s slogan is “It’s great to be alive in Colma.”)
Dorst’s novel was praised for taking the naturally eerie setting and fusing it with both supernatural elements and a by-the-book approach of a police procedural. The producers are aiming to give it a Chinatown or Se7en vibe, joined with the creepiness of The Sixth Sense! 
Universal has been having a hell of a time getting their Universal Monsters brand back on a better path in the wake of the Dark Universe collapsing, with four movies thus far released in the years since The Mummy attempted to get that interconnected universe off the ground.
First was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, to date the only post-Mummy hit for the Universal Monsters, followed by The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and now Abigail. The latter three films have attempted to bring Dracula back to the screen in fresh ways, but both Demeter and Renfield severely underperformed at the box office. And while Abigail is a far better vampire movie than those two, it’s unfortunately also struggling to turn a profit.
Where does the Universal Monsters brand go from here? The good news is that Universal and Blumhouse have once again enlisted the help of Leigh Whannell for their upcoming Wolf Man reboot, which is howling its way into theaters in January 2025. This is good news, of course, because Whannell’s Invisible Man was the best – and certainly most profitable – of the post-Dark Universe movies that Universal has been able to conjure up. The film ended its worldwide run with $144 million back in 2020, a massive win considering the $7 million budget.
Given the film was such a success, you may wondering why The Invisible Man 2 hasn’t come along in these past four years. But the wait for that sequel may be coming to an end.
Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, The Invisible Man star Elisabeth Moss notes that she feels “very good” about the sequel’s development at this point in time.
“Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures]… we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss updates this week. “And I feel very good about it.”
She adds, “We are very much intent on continuing that story.”
At the end of the 2020 movie, Elisabeth Moss’s heroine Cecilia Kass uses her stalker’s high-tech invisibility suit to kill him, now in possession of the technology that ruined her life.
Stay tuned for more on The Invisible Man 2 as we learn it.
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