James Wan stays busy bringing the world new genre projects, and he has just signed on to produce another one. Wan and his production company Atomic Monster are joining forces with JS Entertainment and Starlight Media to shepherd the camping trip horror story THE TROOP to the screen.
E.L. Katz, director of CHEAP THRILLS (pictured above), will be taking the helm of the film, working from a screenplay by Noah Gardner and Aidan Fitzgerald that's based on a 2016 novel by Nick Cutter. Copies of Cutter's novel can be purchased on Amazon.
Cutter's novel earned high praise from Stephen King, who said the story "scared the hell out of me." Described as a mixture of Lord of the Flies and 28 DAYS LATER, it had the following description:
Once every year, Scoutmaster Tim Riggs leads a troop of boys into the Canadian wilderness for a weekend camping trip — a tradition as comforting and reliable as a good ghost story around a roaring bonfire. But when an unexpected intruder stumbles upon their campsite — shockingly thin, disturbingly pale, and voraciously hungry — Tim and the boys are exposed to something far more frightening than any tale of terror. The human carrier of a bioengineered nightmare. A horror that spreads faster than fear. A harrowing struggle for survival with no escape from the elements, the infected… or one another.
That sounds promising. The synopsis for the cinematic adaptation says it will follow
a group of teens on a remote camping trip who must fend for themselves when their adult chaperone falls prey to an aggressive otherworldly infection.
Wan is currently working on a horror directorial effort of his own, and will then be moving on to directing AQUAMAN 2. Atomic Monster's upcoming releases include THE CONJURING 3 (September 11, 2020), MORTAL KOMBAT (March 5, 2021), the Netflix project THERE'S SOMEONE INSIDE YOUR HOUSE, and the horror AQUAMAN spin-off THE TRENCH, which was also written by Gardner and Fitzgerald.