Genre: Horror.
Studio:
Warner Brothers.
Production Company:
The Canton Company.
Project Phase: Development Hell.
Who's In It:
Unknown.
Who's Making It:
Steven T. Seagle (Screenwriter); Mark Canton (Producer); based upon the Vertigo/DC
comic book series House of Secrets created by Steven T. Seagle and Teddy Kristiansen.
Premise: There's more inside the dark, deserted, old mansion than just a place to squat for the homeless Rain Harper. Listen and you'll hear it -- shifting somewhere between the old boards, moving between the air punctured by razors of light squinting through the boarded-up windows, the house is aware that you are inside of it. And when it reaches out into the city of Seattle, it will grabs whomever it seeks and force them to decend into the basement and pronounce their secret. And when the asembled spirits known as the Juris make their decision known, Rain will be forced to read their verdict aloud -- and see what happens to the individual whose secret convicts them for all eternity.
Release Date: Halloween 1999.
Comments: For those hip enough to be reading DC/Vertigo's House of Secrets, you know what everyone else has been missing out on. Now it seems Mark Canton, one of Hollywood's comic book savvy producers, is one of them. In the wake of the teen horror genre revival (Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream 2), Warner Brothers wants to emulate this property to follow in the footsteps of these previous box office successes.
Two big things are going for this: one, there's more to this picture than another slasher out to rack up a score of dead teens. The comic is loaded with realistic characters, each with secrets of their own. The supernatural Juris, consisting of six ghosts of people who died through some ordeal of justice, are frighteningly believable. And the spooky ambiance of the dilapidated Seattle Reichuss mansion is reason enough to transfer to film...after all, who doesn't want to see the inside of a haunted house?
Second and perhaps most importantly is the involvement of Seaven Seagle as the project's attached writer. Seagle has made a notch for himself in the four-color world, co-writing Sandman Mystery Theatre (another book worthy of being greenlit) and Marvel's patriarch of their lineup, Uncanny X-Men. If we had our choice to pick the writer who'd adapt the comic into film, it'd be Seagle. Glad to see he's going to get his chance to do just that. What we don't need to see is a Scream knock-off; what we hope to see is something resembling The Haunting of Hill House with Gen-X as the leads.
August 18, 1998... At a San Diego Comic Con panel discussing upcoming developments on DC Vertigo line of imprint comics, House of Secrets editor Shelly Roeberg gave the audience an update on the status of the House of Secrets film. Steven Seagle has completed another rewrite to the script and while the project's still in development hell, all associated with the film version are aiming to begin pre-production of the film by the fall of 1998. If that goes ahead, the film will be released to theaters around Halloween 1999. [Reported by Patrick Sauriol.]
Rumors: Unknown.
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