Shawn Levy's production company 21 Laps Entertainment, one of the companies behind the Netflix hit Stranger Things, is set to produce an adaptation of author Riley Sager's upcoming novel HOME BEFORE DARK for Sony Pictures.
Dutton won't even be publishing the book until June 30th (you can pre-order a copy HERE), but there was a bidding war over the film rights and Sony came out the winner.
The story of HOME BEFORE DARK seems to be inspired by the question, "What if one of the Lutz kids had moved back into the AMITYVILLE HORROR house?" The Amityville inspiration is so clear, the Lutz story even gets a nod in the book's description:
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.
Maia Eyre is overseeing the HOME BEFORE DARK adaptation for Sony, while Emily Morris does the same for 21 Laps.
Now the project needs to find a screenwriter and a director, and we'll let you know when that happens.