After exploring a young woman’s psychological breakdown after her time on a farm run by a cult, Martha Marcy May Marlene director Sean Durkin will return to terrifying rural drama with the Little House On The Prairie movie. First announced in 2012 as a possible project for David Gordon Green, the Scott Rudin-produced movie promises to revisit the series of children’s books penned by Laura Ingalls Wilder, which were subsequently adapted into a Michael Landon TV series about a pioneer community that was psychopathically nice. Woe unto those who were not nice, whose graves little Laura Wilder would merrily frolic upon at the end of every episode.
With a script from Shame’s Abi Morgan and Durkin on board, the Little House On The Prairie film now seems poised to revisit those horrors, exposing the Wilder family’s own sick, pathological cult of wholesomeness and Christian values—in which those who stray from the path and, say, experiment with smoking, or fail to cover up their blossoming womanhood, are duly punished by burning down a school for the blind or being raped and killed by a mime. A perfect marriage of director and material, in other words.