The Lodge and Goodnight Mommy filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala are back this week with the ultra-bleak The Devil’s Bath, arriving on Shudder this Friday, and the filmmakers are already hard at work on their next feature: an adaptation of author Paul Tremblay’s knockout novel A Head Full of Ghosts.
The adaptation was announced earlier this year and will be directed by Franz and Fiala and produced by Robert Downey Jr.
A Head Full of Ghosts sees a young woman recount to a journalist the terrifying story of how her family was publicly ripped apart 20 years prior by her teenage sister’s mysterious affliction. The story “follows the Barretts, whose normal suburban New England life is torn apart when their teenage daughter shows signs of acute schizophrenia, reluctantly leading them to be the subjects of a reality show, ‘The Possession.’ Some 15 years later, Merry faces her family’s haunting past when a journalist is assigned to help tell her side of the story and uncovers the very nature of evil.”
Bloody Disgusting spoke with Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala in a recent chat, where the filmmakers revealed more about their plans for A Head Full of Ghosts.
Readers familiar with A Head Full of Ghosts will know straightaway that it’s a novel that appeals to this particular filmmaking duo: it’s bleak. Of course, that was a large part of the appeal for Franz and Fiala.
Fiala tells Bloody Disgusting, “There’s maybe two things that drew us to the novel. I think, on the one hand, what really talks to us is how bleak it is in a way. We felt it’s very hard to pull off something like that in American films. If you have a book that it’s based on, there is a very good reason for us to tell producers, ‘No, it needs to be that bleak because the book has a following and is as bleak.’ So, I think that that drew us to the book.”
“And it’s very smart,” Fiala continues. “I mean, there are a lot of layers that, if you add them up, make for a very complex portrait of reality. The problem is of how to include all of those layers in a script that’s a normal length.”
“It’s a new challenge for us,“ Franz echoes. “We have never made a movie based on a novel. We met Paul Tremblay the other day because we’re here in Boston now. He’s in the middle of his reading tour, and we bought his new book actually. I’m excited to read it. We really also like him as a person. He is very gentle, very smart, and it was great.“
Not only did Fiala and Franz immediately connect with the book version of A Head Full of Ghosts, but they even traveled to the very house that inspired Tremblay’s novel in the first place to further understand the setting and the horror it produces.
Franz shares, “We were very proud because when he was writing his novel, he told us that he was thinking of the house he grew up in. He gave us the address, and we went there and took a look at it. Yeah, so it was kind of personal. We traveled around in Beverly. Because we are from Austria, we had no idea about Massachusetts and Beverly. So we asked the producers, ‘We want to come here and look around and drive around and just get the feeling for the place.‘”
Fiala elaborates, “Actually, Paul’s old house told us a lot about it because it’s a great area, and I think it’s not at all this horror film cliché that you would get suggested by location scouts if they read the book or the script. It’s a very real place and I think that will add something; taking a house like that or an area that will add something to the film that it will greatly benefit from.”
Stay tuned for more from the filmmakers about their latest, The Devil’s Bath.
The post Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala Tease Plans for ‘A Head Full of Ghosts’ Adaptation [Interview] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.