Dredd/Ex Machina producers line up their next: The Loney

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

The team behind such genre favorites as 28 DAYS LATER, DREDD and last year's EX MACHINA has its next project in its sights, and it sounds like a weird one. Andrew Michael Hurley's novel THE LONEY was released independently last year and is awaiting a mass issuing this May, but it's already racking up heaps of praise; Stephen King has said it's "not just good, it’s great. An amazing piece of fiction."

Good enough for us.

The plot is a bit of a head-scratcher, but it's intriguing nonetheless.

When the remains of a young child are discovered during a winter storm on a stretch of the bleak Lancashire coastline known as the Loney, a man named Smith is forced to confront the terrifying and mysterious events that occurred forty years earlier when he visited the place as a boy. At that time, his devoutly Catholic mother was determined to find healing for Hanny, his disabled older brother. And so the family, along with members of their parish, embarked on an Easter pilgrimage to an ancient shrine.

 

   But not all of the locals were pleased to see visitors in the area. And when the two brothers found their lives entangling with a glamorous couple staying at a nearby house, they became involved in more troubling rites. Smith feels he is the only one to know the truth, and he must bear the burden of his knowledge, no matter what the cost.

DNA Films's Andrew Macdonald and Allon Reich will produce the eventual film adaptation, although no scribe has been assigned the task just yet. Perhaps Alex Garland (Ex Machina) and/or John Hodge (DNA's Trainspotting sequel) will be up for it?