Dear David trailer: film based on Twitter ghost story gets October release

Back in 2017, BuzzFeed writer Adam Ellis wrote out a ghost story (which he swears is completely true) on Twitter, and that story caught so much attention that there was soon talk of a movie adaptation. The project, titled Dear David, was first set up at New Line Cinema in 2018, then made its way over to Lionsgate. Now Lionsgate has announced that they’ll be giving Dear David a theatrical, digital, and VOD release on October 13th – and along with that announcement comes the unveiling of a trailer, which you can watch in the embed above.

Anna and the Apocalypse‘s John McPhail having directed the film from a screenplay by Mike Van Waes. The cast of Dear David is headed up by Augustus Prew (Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series), Justin Long (Tusk), Rene Escobar Jr. (Heartland), Cameron Nicoll (Stolen by Their Father), and Andrea Bang (A Million Little Things). The story centers on Adam Ellis, a former BuzzFeed employee and social media content creator who becomes haunted by the ghost of a boy possessed by a demonic entity. In 2018, Ellis’s Twitter thread about his experiences with the ghost he called ‘Dear David’ went viral, gaining him more than a million followers on the platform.

Here’s the synopsis: Shortly after comic artist Adam (Augustus Prew) responds to Internet trolls, he begins experiencing sleep paralysis — while an empty rocking chair moves in the corner of his apartment. As he chronicles increasingly malevolent occurrences in a series of tweets, Adam begins to believe he is being haunted by the ghost of a dead child named David. Encouraged by his boss to continue the “Dear David” thread, Adam starts to lose his grip on what is online… and what is real.

You can read Ellis’s original tweets at THIS LINK. Van Waes worked with executive producer Evan Turner to develop the story Ellis told into something that work as a feature film. Dear David was produced by Richard Alan Reid of BuzzFeed Studios, Jason Moring, Michael Philip, and Naysun Alae-Carew. Dan Lin serves as executive producer alongside Evan Turner and Jonathan Eirich of Rideback.

What did you think of the Dear David trailer? Will you be watching this movie in October? Let us know by leaving a comment below.