It's probably safe to say that Steven Spielberg can get pretty much anything he wants. Luckily for us, one of the things Spielberg wants right now is to produce (through his company DreamWorks) a scary movie, and a director has now been chosen to bring this horror to the screen: 28 WEEKS LATER helmer Juan Carlos Fresnadillo.
Scripted by THE CONJURING's Chad and Carey Hayes, Spielberg's passion project is being called HAUNTED and is said to be inspired by the classic Henry James novel Turn of the Screw, which was first published in 1898. Turn of the Screw has received many cinematic adaptations over the years, most notably 1961's THE INNOCENTS.
The book's story:
A very young woman's first job: governess for two weirdly beautiful, strangely distant, oddly silent children, Miles and Flora, at a forlorn estate… An estate haunted by a beckoning evil.
Half-seen figures who glare from dark towers and dusty windows – silent, foul phantoms who, day by day, night by night, come closer, ever closer. With growing horror, the helpless governess realizes the fiendish creatures want the children, seeking to corrupt their bodies, possess their minds, own their souls…
But worse – much worse – the governess discovers that Miles and Flora have no terror of the lurking evil.
For they want the walking dead as badly as the dead want them.
Roy Lee, John Middleton, and Scott Bernstein will be producing HAUNTED with Spielberg.
Working from Henry James' story, the material is certainly there to deliver the scary movie that Spielberg wants to make. Now we'll just have to wait and see how it turns out.
THE INNOCENTS