Dear god, they're trying to make a movie out of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian

Of the 12 novels that Cormac McCarthy has penned across his six decades as a dark, bloody stalwart of the literary world, only three have ever been adapted for film. The Coen Brothers did it first, of course, and most successfully, managing to mine deep existential uncertainty (and a Best Picture Oscar) from McCarthy’s sprawling neo-Western No Country For Old Men. In 2013, James Franco adapted McCarthy’s early novel Child Of God to not-especially-welcome reviews. And between them, in 2009, John Hillcoat worked with Viggo Mortensen and Kodi-Smit McPhee to put together a well-received version of one of the author’s more straightforward (if bleak) narratives, the post-apocalyptic The Road.

But nobody, to date, has ever managed to adapt the book that is generally held up as McCarthy’s masterpiece: 1985's Blood Meridian, a massive, horrifying exploration of violence and depravity on the American frontier. (People have tried, mind you; No Country star and avowed McCarthy fan Tommy Lee Jones took a stab at it in the ’90s, with an eye toward starring and directing; Franco and Ridley Scott have also taken their shots. All collapsed in pre-production.) Now, Deadline reports that New Regency has tapped Hillcoat (whose other forays into the world of the Western include 2005's The Proposition) to return to McCarthy’s mind for another shot, announcing a new adaptation of the book this week.

McCarthy himself is set to executive produce, but there’s no word yet on who’ll pen the script which will, presumably, be the rub: The primary issue with film adaptations of Blood Meridian has always been the novel’s violence, which is extreme even by the sometimes lax standards of Hollywood. Scalpings, sexual assaults, and pedophilia all occur at regular intervals in McCarthy’s narrative, as the book’s winding plot follows a young man (referred to only as “The Kid”) who falls in with real-world criminals The Glanton Gang. At the center of the bloodshed and depravity is the enigmatic Judge Holden, a giant, hairless, potentially supernatural man who, we cannot help but note, is basically instant Oscar bait for a class of actors of a certain age. (After all, if playing one of McCarthy’s enigmatic avatars of human evil could rocket Javier Bardem to superstar status pretty much overnight, who wouldn’t want to take on another?)

Hillcoat most recently worked on George & Tammy, directing all six episodes of the Showtime series.