‘Demonkeeper’ Scares up a Director

Fox 2000 purchased the rights to ‘Demonkeeper’ even before Puffin published the book. The studio is developing a live-action feature film adaptation of Royce Buckingham’s novel ‘Demonkeeper’. Sam Fell, whose work includes the animated films ‘The Tale of Despereaux’ and ‘Flushed Away’, has been selected to direct the movie. Story follows a Seattle teen who inherits responsibility for a house filled with demons. When the youth finally breaks free of his charges to go on a date, he returns to discover that kids have broken into the house, unleashing its most vicious demon, the Beast, Killer of Lost Children. — Variety

While this is yet another crossover movie for an animated director to take on a live-action film, it does have a good side… Laeta Kalogridis (Pathfinder) is writing the screenplay. His best work is possibly yet to come, having written ‘Shutter Island’ for Martin Scorsese and ‘Battle Angel’ for James Cameron. The story sounds cool and while it could make a neat dark movie for kids both young and old, the concern with these kinds of movies is always one of whether the studio will dumb it down and lighten it up, maintaining the false belief that kid’s can’t handle darker subject matter.

[source: Variety]