Paramount, the studio whose Scream VI is currently scaring up the box office, continues to bet on horror, picking up spec package He’ll Come Knocking.
Patrick Brice, who last directed the thriller There’s Someone Inside Your House, is on board to direct the feature project, which is written by Jordan Goldberg and Alex Paraskevas.
Marty Bowen and Wyck Godfrey’s Temple Hill Entertainment, which was behind the surprise horror hit Smile for the studio, is producing Knocking.
Adapting a story by author Robert McCammon, Knocking tells of an ex-con who gets a new job in a revitalized factory town in the hopes of turning around his family’s life, only to soon discover that their idyllic suburban dream requires a terrible sacrifice.
Sources describe the project as being in the tone of the fight-for-your-life survival aspects of such movies as Ready or Not, The Purge and Squid Game.
McCammon is a name in horror literature thanks to his novel Swan Song, which tied for the 1987 Bram Stoker Award with Stephen King’s Misery. Among his more than 20 novels and two short-story collections, his tale “Nightcrawlers” was adapted into an episode of the 1980s revival of The Twilight Zone.
Goldberg and Paraskevas have worked on several projects around town, including The Belt for Matt Reeves’ 6th and Idaho and Fox, and Edison for Bad Robot and Paramount, while setting up specs The Gun Eaters at Paramount and Asterisks at Warner Bros. Separately, Goldberg worked with Christopher Nolan for numerous years, with involvement in the filmmaker’s movies from Batman Begins to Interstellar. He is also a co-exec producer on Dune: The Sisterhood and previously worked on Westworld.
Brice most recently directed There’s Someone Inside Your House, a Netflix horror movie produced by Atomic Monster and 21 Laps. His previous credits include horror-comedy Corporate Animals and found-footage horror movies Creep and Creep 2.
Goldberg and Paraskevas are repped by UTA, Grandview and Goodman Genow. Brice is repped by CAA, Grandview and Jackoway Austen. McCammon is repped by ChengCaplan Company.
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