A Quiet Place writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods will team up again, this time to adapt Stephen King’s early short story The Boogeyman. Directed by John Krasinski, A Quiet Place stunned audiences while scaring up blockbuster numbers for a very grateful Paramount, finishing with $325 million in worldwide grosses. After a performance like that, it’s no surprise that writers Beck and Woods are already conjuring up ideas for a sequel to A Quiet Place.
With its classic fright-film premise of a family trying to survive amid an invasion of sound-sensitive aliens, A Quiet Place drew plenty of comparisons to the work of horror master Stephen King. Indeed, King himself publicly expressed admiration for the film, calling it “extraordinary.” King’s work has itself become a hot commodity on the movie market, after the massive success of last year’s IT, based on the author’s voluminous 1986 novel of an evil clown terrorizing a small Maine community across the decades. Multiple King adaptations are currently in the works, including a remake of Pet Sematary, a new feature film based on Tommyknockers and a TV series version of his most recent novel The Outsider.
In a case of a potentially perfect marriage of writing talents, Deadline reports that A Quiet Place scribes Scott Beck and Bryan Woods will help bring yet another Stephen King work to the screen, adapting his early short story The Boogeyman. Twentieth Century Fox is putting the deal together with 21 Laps, the Shawn Levy-led production company responsible for Stranger Things (another series filled with echoes of King). The Boogeyman has previously been adapted multiple times as a short film, but this is the first time it will come to life as a feature.
Originally published in 1973 and later reprinted in King’s wildly popular short story collection Night Shift, The Boogeyman concerns a man named Lester Billings, who has seen three of his children die at the hands of a supernatural entity that lives in a closet. The story is mainly set in a psychiatrist’s office as Billings tells the horrific story of how he and his wife attempted to evade the Boogeyman, only to lose yet another child to the monster. Like many King stories, including IT, Cujo and Pet Sematary, the story taps into primal fears about children falling prey to evil forces.
Indeed, A Quiet Place itself tapped into many of the same terrors that King has explored in The Boogeyman and so many of his other works. Twentieth Century Fox is hoping that the pairing of King with the men who helped conjure up the creatures of A Quiet Place will result in monster box office returns.
More: Movies And TV Shows You Didn’t Know Were Stephen King Adaptations
Source: Deadline
