Actress and filmmaker Brea Grant caused a stir this past year generating buzz with harrowing thrillers like 12 Hour Shift and starring in Natasha Kermani’s cyclic and nightmaring feminist home invasion romp, Lucky. As of late, Fangoria was first to report and with the rest of us now able to get the word out on her latest venture with writer/producer/director Ed Dougherty (Paint It Black, 7 Witches), optioning the rights to Jeremy C. Shipp’s horror novella The Atrocities.
The move signals a launchpad for joint venture, The Squirrels, under Grant and Dougherty. The two are penning the script with Grant making her return to the director’s chair, adapting the story of “Danna, a modern-day governess who works for the elite and is summoned to Stockton House to tutor a young girl named Isabella Evers. Upon arriving, she realizes her new charge has already passed away, but the girl’s parents insist her ghost is in need of an education.”
“I have been a fan of Jeremy’s work for a number of years and am excited to bring this new take on the Gothic novel to life on screen,” says Grant. “I immediately knew this was the perfect project to collaborate on. It has one of the greatest all time premises I’ve ever seen in a horror novel and I think it’ll make an unforgettable film,” continues Dougherty.
Shipp calls The Atrocities his love letter to the Gothic genre, adding “my goal when writing the book was to create a modern-day ghost story that utilizes certain tropes of the genre while simultaneously turning these devices on their head. I wanted to explore the dissonance created by colliding the supernatural and the rational, the modern and the archaic. I also wanted to construct a nightmarescape of a house that’s both grotesquely beautiful and beautifully grotesque.”