If you ask me, there’s a lot to get excited about in the mere suggestion of Wizard of Oz + horror movie. And, really, there isn’t much to know beyond that at the moment. Variety reports that L. Frank Baum’s magical land, abounding with directional witches, archetypal post-human men, and opiate fields is next in New Line’s line to become a horror movie, following two Conjuring movies, Lights Out, and a new adaptation of Stephen King’s It.
The studio bought a pitch from Mike Van Waes, a screenwriter who recently penned a script that ended up on Hollywood’s Black List. That script, titled Hammerspace, was ultimately sold to Warner Bros., and sounds weird as hell: it follows a dying teenager into an animated alternate realm in search of answers about his father.
Again, there’s pretty much no additional information about this still-untitled project. Whether an undead Dorothy Gale will actually come crawling out of a TV screen, whether Glinda will terrorize a household of ultra-religious 17th century American colonists, whether the poppies will get angry about the anthropocene and pull a Happening, all remains to be seen.