David Harbour, Anthony Mackie, and Tig Notaro to star in Netflix ghost movie

Director Christopher Landon is carving out a nice little niche of clever horror-comedies after Happy Death Day and Freaky, and now he’s taking on ghost story—though, oddly, it might end up being even less of a horror movie than his other films were. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Landon is set to direct We Have A Ghost, an adaptation of Geoff Manaugh’s short story Ernest (which you can read over at Vice, if you don’t mind the spoilers for the movie version) for Netflix, with David Harbour, Anthony Mackie, Jennifer Coolidge, Tig Notaro, and Jahi Di’Allo Winston from Charm City Kings starring.

The original story is about a family that realizes their home is being haunted by a ghost they call Ernest, and after compiling undeniable proof that the ghost is real and that it’s the leftover spirit of a dead person, they become social media stars and promptly start to exploit the ghost for fame. The story’s main kid, Kevin, befriends the ghost and decides to start investigating how he became a ghost and who he was when he was alive, which—as THR describes it—makes them “a target of the CIA.” That’s not quite what happens in the story, which seemingly suggests that there will be some alterations made to the plot, but they could just be obfuscating the details a bit so as not to spoil anything. (Again, the whole story is available to be read, for free, at the link up there.)

Either way, this is all decidedly less violent than Happy Death Day and Freaky, with THR even classifying it as a “family adventure,” so it’s really going to emphasize the comedy over the horror, barring some truly unexpected tweaks to the original material. The THR story doesn’t say who will play the ghost and who will play the family members.