Director Jonathan Levine Heads to a Haunted IKEA-Like Store with HORRORSTÖR at Searchlight
If you’ve ever wandered through a massive furniture warehouse and felt like something was off, you’re going to love this. Jonathan Levine is officially set to direct a feature adaptation of Horrorstör, the horror-comedy novel by Grady Hendrix, for Searchlight Pictures.
This is a haunted house story set inside an IKEA-style superstore. Searchlight is teaming up with New Republic Pictures on the project, which originally landed film rights back in 2020.
Before that, Gail Berman’s The Jackal Group had been developing the book as a TV series at Fox. Now it’s making the leap to the big screen, and Levine is taking the reins.
Horrorstör flips the classic haunted house formula on its head. The story is set inside Orsk, a sprawling furniture superstore that feels a lot like IKEA. Employees start noticing strange things happening after hours.
Furniture is smashed. Showrooms are trashed. Weird messes appear out of nowhere. With corporate breathing down their necks and morale dropping fast, the store manager convinces a handful of staffers to stay overnight and figure out what’s going on.
Levine also wrote the latest draft of the script, working from an earlier version by Hendrix himself. Producing are Brian Oliver for New Republic, Gillian Bohrer for Megamix, Adam Goldworm for Aperture Entertainment, and Brad Fischer.
Hendrix is on board as executive producer along with the book’s publisher, Quirk Books. Over at Searchlight, VP of Production Richard Ruiz.
Levine might not be the first name you think of for horror, but he’s no stranger to genre mashups. He directed Long Shot and 50/50, and broke out at Sundance with The Wackness.
He also took on zombies with Warm Bodies, the 2013 adaptation of the Isaac Marion novel starring Nicholas Hoult and Teresa Palmer. Up next for him is the sports drama Mr. Irrelevant, starring David Corenswet as NFL player John Tuggle, which hits theaters on Christmas Day from Paramount and Skydance.
Hendrix, meanwhile, has become one of the most reliable names in horror fiction. Horrorstör was a New York Times bestseller, and his other novels continue to attract major Hollywood attention.
How To Sell a Haunted House is set up at Legendary with Sam Raimi’s Ghost House producing. Ankle Snatcher is in development at Columbia with Escape Artists. The Blanks is headed to Netflix with 21 Laps, and Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is also part of his growing slate of adaptations. Collectively, his books have sold more than two million copies worldwide.
If Levine leans into the absurdity and the scares, this could turn into a wickedly entertaining horror-comedy that hits that sweet spot between creepy and hilarious.
Source: Deadline