These days, if Stephen King is sitting at home and there’s nothing good on TV, he simply scribbles some words on a piece of paper and tosses it out the window, and within minutes whatever he wrote has been turned into a film, ready for viewing. Thus, when he actually bothers to put together an entire story, the speed at which it gets translated to the screen is roughly equivalent to the pace at which new Mark Millar comics are adapted into films. So it should surprise no one that Screen Daily reports In The Tall Grass, a novella King co-wrote with his son Joe Hill in 2012, is being turned into a movie.
The screenplay is being written by Vincenzo Natali, the gifted writer-director who helmed the cult classic Cube and superlative episodes of TV’s Hannibal. (He also made Splice, because it’s an imperfect world and we all make mistakes.) The story involves a young man and his pregnant sister who end up fighting for their lives in a field after responding to someone’s cries for help. As Natali describes it, there’s a good reason things go south in the narrative: “Space is warped so that one minute they are together and the next they are miles apart. The field is an ineffable maze from which there is no escape. Before long they have lost their bearings and each other. But they are not alone,” he concludes, in case you were worried this was leading to a moody existential reverie about humankind’s solitude, à la Gerry.
The film is scheduled to start shooting in September. The next Stephen King adaptation is scheduled to begin as soon as the writer discards his most recent grocery list.