Universal Pictures‘Keeping the lights on won’t keep you safe’: Stranger Things‘ Finn Wolfhard stars in the creepy new trailer for haunted house horror The Turning.
Floria Sigismondi’s upcoming film is based on Henry James’ 1898 gothic novella The Turn of the Screw – which is also being adapted for the second season of Netflix’s The Haunting Of Hill House next year.
There’s ghosts, spiders, misty gardens, wandering hands: the sort of creepy imagery that’ll keep audiences up at night.
Check out The Turning trailer below:
The film will see Mackenzie Davis – star of Black Mirror‘s San Junipero and the soon-to-be-released Terminator: Dark Fate – as Kate, a nanny hired to look after two weird kids, Miles (Wolfhard) and Flora (The Florida Project‘s Brooklynn Prince), at a large country estate in Maine.
Like the trendy, streamlined title, Sigismondi has modernised the legendary story for contemporary audiences.
Universal PicturesIn an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Sigismondi said:
It’s a very dark story that’s endured for over a hundred years. We’ve taken this story, and modernized it, and placed it in the 1990s.
It follows a nanny who is looking [for] a life change, and when she arrives at the house she meets two orphans, Flora and Miles.
They start to act a little strange and she senses that they’re harbouring a secret, that they’re hiding something from her. She quickly realizes that there’s something wrong in the house.
Sigismondi’s portfolio is full of excellent work: as well as directing 2010 rock biopic The Runaways, the filmmaker has helmed episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale and Netflix’s Daredevil.
The classic tale has seen the screen before, most notably in Jack Clayton’s 1961 movie The Innocents.
Universal PicturesSpeaking on the legacy of that film, Sigismondi added:
I studied what worked in that film, and the atmosphere it created, and how the house became a character, and what we saw and didn’t see.
I also loved how that film made it about the nanny and not just about the things that were happening in the house. So, I really drew upon those things, and modernised it, and made it my own.
While this will be a more direct adaptation, the Netflix horror anthology’s next season, The Haunting Of Bly Manor, will instead borrow elements of James’ works – but showrunner Mike Flanagan says it’s going to be ‘unbelievably scary.
NetflixIn an interview with Birth.Movies.Death, Flanagan said:
We’re looking at all the ghost stories of Henry James as the jumping-off point for the season, so it very much is a whole new deal. It’s a cool way to expand on some of the things I loved about season one, but within the framework of a new story, without having to be restrained by the decisions we made last time.
For Henry James fans, it’s going to be pretty wild, and for people who aren’t familiar with his work, it’s going to be unbelievably scary. I already think it’s much scarier than season one, so I’m very excited about it.
The Turning hits cinemas on January 24, 2020. The Haunting Of Bly Manor will also drop on Netflix sometime next year.
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After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University with an NCTJ and BCTJ-accredited Multimedia Journalism degree, Cameron ventured into the world of print journalism at The National, while also working as a freelance film journalist on the side, becoming an accredited Rotten Tomatoes critic in the process. He’s now left his Scottish homelands and took up residence at UNILAD as a journalist.