Movies
Sony Locks Up Rights to Gothic Horror Story ‘Where The Devil Hides’
Columbia Pictures has preemptively acquired the rights to Where The Devil Hides, a new gothic horror novel by Craig Russell, reports Deadline.
Set in Eastern Europe, Where the Devil Hides follows a physician set to experiment on the six deadliest killers in history, who’ve been imprisoned for life within a remote mental asylum, with a dark history and bloody secrets all its own.
The U.S. publishing rights to the novel just sold to Doubleday’s Jason Kaufman, the same editor who shepherded Dan Brown’s mega-bestselling Da Vinci Code, which was adapted into a $1.4 billion film franchise also by Columbia Pictures. Little, Brown UK (Constable Books) will release the book, tentatively due out April 2019 stateside and in the UK.
Jake Bauman, Sony Pictures’ new VP of literary development in New York, first discovered the book. David Beaubaire and Kira Thompson will oversee for Columbia. Joel Gotler at IPG negotiated the film deal working in conjunction with David Higham Associates.
Filming is underway in New Jersey on Parker Finn’s remake of Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 psychological horror movie Possession, and Deadline reports that three new faces have joined the cast.
Madeline Brewer (Cam, “You”), Emory Cohen (Sweetheart, Lords of Chaos), and Nicholas Alexander Chavez (“Grotesquerie“) have joined previously announced cast members Margaret Qualley, Callum Turner, Diego Calva, and Paul Dano.
Parker Finn is writing, directing and producing the new take on Possession.
Just how closely Finn’s update will follow the 1981 cult classic remains to be seen, but the original film starred Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill as married couple Anna and Mark in Cold War-era West Berlin whose relationship spirals into a supernatural nightmare. Suspicions of infidelity soon give way to something much more sinister.
Isabelle Adjani’s unforgettable performance, particularly the infamous subway sequence that remains one of horror’s most iconic scenes, helped catapult the 1981 film into cult masterpiece status and remains influential, even as recent as Nell Tiger Free’s turn in The First Omen.
Adjani previously gave the remake, and Qualley’s casting in particular, her blessing.
Producers include Jonathan Fass, Roy Lee, Andrew Childs, and Robert Pattinson. Marc Bienstock will executive produce.