While Paramount continues to figure out a way to wrest a movie out of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, MGM is developing a feature film based on another of the author's sprawling, loosely connected anthologies. Deadline reports that producers Denise Di Novi and Alison Greenspan have acquired From The Dust Returned, the 2002 book spawned from Bradbury's 1946 short story "Homecoming," about a human child living with a family of vampires, werewolves, mummies, and assorted ghouls—a trendy premise that's been echoed in everything from Dark Shadows to NBC's reboot of The Munsters to Neil Gaiman's recently optioned The Graveyard Book, as well as the unconscious dreams of a society longing to be free of the banality of modern humanity, and maybe have sex with a monster or something.
As with previously optioned Bradbury anthologies like Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man—which Di Novi and Greenspan once had going with Zack Snyder, before he realized there were barely any bone-breaking scenes—there's no director officially attached yet, or any indication on how they plan to streamline Bradbury's meticulously piled, ornate descriptions into a movie narrative. But at least this news provides the always-welcome reminder that Ray Bradbury is still alive.