According to Variety, Stranger Things and IT star Finn Wolfhard will stay the course in the horror genre by co-starring opposite Mackenzie Davis (Blade Runner 2049, The Martian) in Amblin’s haunted house film The Turning. Based on Henry James’s famous novella The Turn of the Screw (a source of several movie adaptations, including The Innocents), the story revolves around a young woman (Davis) who becomes the nanny of two orphans who live in a haunted country mansion. Wolfhard will play one of the orphans.
If this film sounds familiar, that’s because it was intended to be shot last year on a $17 million dollar budget as Haunted under director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (28 Weeks Later, Intruders) for DreamWorks Pictures, and set to star Rose Leslie (Game of Thrones) and Alfre Woodard (Captain America: Civil War). Based on a script by Chad and Carey Hayes (The Conjuring), Haunted went through a page-one rewrite by Scott Z. Burns (The Bourne Ultimatum, Side Effects) that caused such seismic changes in the fabric of the story (altering characters, action, even the title) that it no longer resembled the project the studio signed on to make. In September of 2016, five weeks before shooting, producer Steven Spielberg personally pulled the plug on the project. Spielberg and other execs decided the best course of action was to fire Fresnadillo and Burns, going back to the original Hayes Brothers script and looking to start fresh development, despite $5 million having already been spent.
This new version of Haunted, now titled The Turning, will be directed by Floria Sigismondi, who helmed 2010’s Joan Jett biopic The Runaways as well as episodes of Hemlock Grove, Daredevil and American Gods. Newcomer and Black List screenwriter Jade Bartlett is penning the new draft based on the Hayes’ original script, with production expected to get going in early 2018. Scott Bernstein (Straight Outta Compton) and Roy Lee (IT) will produce.
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