Osgood Perkins has been a horror director on our radar for years now, and after the 1-2-3 punch of The Blackcoat’s Daughter, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House and this weekend’s impressive Gretel and Hansel you can damn well bet we’re interested in whatever his next project is going to be.
And it just so happens that his next project may very well be A Head Full of Ghosts, an adaptation of a novel by Paul G. Tremblay about a girl whose father diagnosed her mental illness as a demonic possession. What’s more, the possession will be nationally televised.
“It’s possible,” Perkins told Bloody-Disgusting in a new interview. “It’s certainly a script that I’m happy about. Whether or not that becomes a movie, you know how it goes.”
Although he’s hedging his bets – because we all know how easy it is for even the most promising projects to never get off the ground in Hollywood – he does have his own take on the novel’s story, which he’s adapted to fit his own artistic vision and personal experience.
“What I liked about it is that what I saw in it, which was a change I made both from the novel and from the drafts that existed before I came aboard,” Perkins explained, “was the quality of, I wanted to make sure it was really a movie about the young woman who had suffered a trauma that she was never going to be okay about.”
“She was never going to recover from [the trauma], she was never going to be alright. And I felt like to create a portraiture of someone who had experienced an unimaginable loss, and it connects to my own personal life experience… it was almost like an opportunity to take care of a character who I could understand had been really permanently heartbroken,” Perkins said.
When asked if he would describe his plans for A Head Full of Ghosts as a loose adaptation, Perkins had words of encouragement.
“I would say that the script at this point is sort of looser than not,” Perkins said. “The good news is that the writer is really pleased with what I’ve done and has been kind and generous enough to say so. He calls it a sister. He calls the script and the novel sisters, which I think is great.”
We’ll find out if that’s an apt comparison when, and if, Osgood Perkins’ film version of A Head Full of Ghosts gets off the ground. Until then, we have his new fairy tale/horror hybrid Gretel and Hansel to keep us company. It’s in theaters this weekend.
