CBS Films Acquires THE KEEP with Dragon Tattoo Director Niels Arden Oplev
Looks like we have a cool medieval horror film coming our way. CBS Films has just acquired the screen rights to Jennifer Egan's 2006 best-selling horror novel The Keep, and the director of the original version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Niels Arden Oplev is set to adapt the story for the big screen. The studio is also currently in final negotiations to acquire the adapted screenplay written by Ehren Kruger (The Skeleton Key, The Ring, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen).
The story is described as "The Ring meets Inception". The Keep is a story within a story about two cousins with a shared secret who reunite to renovate a legendary haunted medieval castle that turns dreams and nightmares into reality.
This sounds like it could be a fun and different kind of horror film, and I'm looking forward to seeing it. I also love that the studio got Oplev on board to direct the film, he did a great job with Dragon Tattoo.
Here's the full description of the book:
From National Book Award finalist Jennifer Egan, author of Look at Me (“Brilliantly unnerving . . . A haunting, sharp, splendidly articulate novel” —The New York Times), a spellbinding work of literary suspense enacted in a chilling psychological landscape—a dazzling tour de force.
Two cousins, irreversibly damaged by a childhood prank whose devastating consequences changed both their lives, reunite twenty years later to renovate a medieval castle in Eastern Europe, a castle steeped in blood lore and family pride. Built over a secret system of caves and tunnels, the castle and its violent history invoke and subvert all the elements of a gothic past: twins, a pool, an old baroness, a fearsome tower. In an environment of extreme paranoia, cut off from the outside world, the men reenact the signal event of their youth, with even more catastrophic results. And as the full horror of their predicament unfolds, a prisoner, in jail for an unnamed crime, recounts an unforgettable story—a story about two cousins who unite to renovate a castle—that brings the crimes of the past and present into piercing relation.
Egan’s relentlessly gripping page-turner plays with rich forms—ghost story, love story, gothic—and transfixing themes: the undertow of history, the fate of imagination in the cacophony of modern life, the uncanny likeness between communications technology and the supernatural. In a narrative that shifts seamlessly from an ancient European castle to a maximum security prison, Egan conjures a world from which escape is impossible and where the keep—the last stand, the final holdout, the place you run to when the walls are breached—is both everything worth protecting and the very thing that must be surrendered in order to survive.
A novel of fierce intelligence and velocity; a bravura performance from a writer of consummate skill and style.