Academy Award winner to write remake of Vietnamese horror film The Housemaid

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

On February 16th, IFC Midnight will be giving a VOD release to writer/director Derek Nguyen's THE HOUSEMAID (a.k.a. CO HAU GAI), Vietnam's highest grossing horror film of all time. According to an anonymous synopsis writer on IMDb, THE HOUSEMAID tells the following story:

When an orphaned Vietnamese girl is hired to be a housemaid at a haunted rubber plantation in 1953 French Indochina, she unexpectedly falls in love with the French landowner and awakens the vengeful ghost of his dead wife… who is out for blood.

If you check out that film later this month and enjoy it, then you can start looking forward to its English-language remake, which just got the greenlight by Korea's CJ Entertainment, the same company that financed and produced the original.

Geoffrey Fletcher, who won an Academy Award for writing 2009's PRECIOUS, will be writing the remake's screenplay, staying true to the original concept while moving the setting to

the deep South during the Reconstruction Era.

This new version of THE HOUSEMAID is being produced by Don Handfield, Timothy Linh Bui, Tae Sung Jeong, and Francis Chung. Nguyen and Mike Im serve as executive producers.

Nguyen had this to say about his film getting the remake treatment: 

When writing the original script for The Housemaid, I became aware of the many parallels between the lives of Vietnamese indentured servants during the French colonial period and African American slaves in the American South. It’s an honor to have a celebrated screenwriter such as Geoffrey Fletcher shed light on the horrors of brutal injustice in a new version that will not only entertain but provoke thought."

I haven't seen the original THE HOUSEMAID yet, so it doesn't mean much to me that it's getting a remake. The plot seems interesting, but I'll have to watch the movie later this month so I can start forming an opinion.