Home Before Dark: Patrick Brice directing haunted house movie for Stranger Things producers

Two and a half years ago, Sony Pictures came out the winner in a bidding war over the film rights to author Riley Sager’s novel Home Before Dark (pick up a copy HERE) – which hadn’t even been published yet at the time. Now the project is finally moving forward, as The Hollywood Reporter breaks the news that Creep and There’s Someone Inside Your House director Patrick Brice has signed on to direct the film, working from a screenplay by The Invitation‘s Blair Butler.

Shawn Levy’s production company 21 Laps Entertainment, one of the companies behind the Netflix series Stranger Things, is producing Home Before Dark, with SVP Emily Morris and creative executive Emily Feher overseeing the project. Since the adaptation is said to be in the “early development” phase, Sony isn’t sharing details on the plot… but since it’s based on Sager’s novel, we can use the description of the book to get an idea of what the movie is going to be about.

Clearly drawing inspiration from the Lutz family and The Amityville Horror (which even gets a nod in the description), Home Before Dark tells the following story:

A woman returns to the house made famous by her father’s bestselling horror memoir and the issue becomes, is it really haunted as her father claimed? Some 25 years earlier, the young woman moved with her parents into Baneberry Hall, a rambling Victorian estate in the Vermont woods. They spent three weeks there before fleeing in the dead of night, an ordeal Ewan later recounted in a nonfiction book called House of Horrors that described ghostly encounters with spirits that rivaled The Amityville Horror in popularity—and skepticism.

The woman restores old homes and was too young to remember what her father described in a book that made him rich. She inherits the property and counts herself a skeptic when she returns to renovate the home. She is confronted from many who belong to the home’s past. To the point she begins to think maybe he wasn’t making it up.

That sounds interesting enough, and Brice has made some solid movies before, so I look forward to seeing how Home Before Dark is going to turn out.

Brice’s directing credits also include The Overnight, Creep 2, Corporate Animals, and episodes of Room 104. In addition to writing The Invitation, Butler has also worked on the screenplays for Hell Fest and Polaroid.

How does Home Before Dark sound to you? Have you read Riley Sager’s novel? Share your thoughts on this one by leaving a comment below.