After spending around 20 months guiding the next FRIDAY THE 13TH through development hell, director David Bruckner dropped out of the project last December. While it's looking like that film might end up being directed by Breck Eisner, Bruckner has been busy making up for lost time and setting up other projects. It was announced back in May that he'll be writing and directing a sci-fi thriller called OSWALD, and now he has signed on to direct an adaptation of Adam Nevill's 2012 novel THE RITUAL.
As we heard in April, THE RITUAL is being produced by Andy Serkis through his production company The Imaginarium. Joe Barton was working on the screenplay at that time, but now Bruckner will be writing his own draft of the script.
Rafe Spall, Rob James-Collier, and Sam Troughton are already attached to star.
The novel tells the story of
four friends from college who head off into the Scandinavian wild in an effort to get away from it all and reconnect with each other. But what begins as a trip of bonding and friendship turns into a nightmare when they take a shortcut and end up lost. Some of them are injured and they seem stranded with nothing but forest in every direction. While trying to find their way back to civilization, they come across what seems to be an abandoned cottage. Inside they discover ancient artifacts on the wall and bones scattered on the floor in a sacrificial manner. They soon discover that something is stalking them and is intent on keeping them from leaving the woods.
Bruckner won't get to show us his take on FRIDAY THE 13TH, but he is still going to make a movie about campers getting stalked and murdered.
Bruckner previously directed segments of the films THE SIGNAL (2007), V/H/S, and SOUTHBOUND.