Watch the Children with Care in The Turning Trailer

October 9, 2019

After pushing back the release of the modern adaptation of the classic horror novella earlier this year, Universal and Amblin have debuted the first trailer for The Turning starring Terminator: Dark Fate‘s Mackenzie Davis and Stranger Things‘ Finn Wolfhard, which can be viewed in the player below!

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 in 2017 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 looking to start fresh on 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 penned the new draft based on the Hayes’ original script, with production going from February to April 2018 in Ireland. Scott Bernstein (Straight Outta Compton) and Roy Lee (IT) will produce.

The Turning is set to hit theaters on January 24, 2020.