The director of Brightburn is heading to Netflix for a…family movie?

Yep. David Yarovesky, who directed the nasty, James Gunn-produced, supervillain origin story Brightburn, is on board to direct Night Books, a film adaptation of author J.A. White’s children’s fantasy story about a young boy who is imprisoned by a witch. Horror legends Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert are producing, while Krysten Ritter, Winslow Fegley, and Lidya Jewett are lined up to star. Get more Night Books movie details below.

Deadline reports that a Night Books movie will be the next project for Brightburn director David Yarovesky, whose previous credits also include the 2014 horror film The Hive. The film is based on White’s 2019 novel Nightbooks (the book title is only one word), which “follows Alex (Fegley), a boy obsessed with scary stories, who is imprisoned by an evil young witch (Ritter) in her contemporary New York City apartment. He meets Yasmin (Jewett), who is also trapped there, and learns he must tell a new scary story every night in order to stay alive.”

There must be something in the air, because this is the second project I’ve heard about over the past few weeks which involves the idea of characters telling scary stories to each other in high-stakes scenarios. (The other is an indie horror comedy called Scare Me, which is streaming right now on Shudder.)

Casting Krysten Ritter as an evil witch sounds pretty perfect to me, although since this movie is described as a “family pic,” she won’t be able to get totally unhinged as this character. (Still, maybe this will inspire someone else to cast her as a witch in a project where she can really let loose.) Lidya Jewett played young Nakia in Black Panther and has had roles in Hidden Figures, Good Girls, and Feel the Beat. And look out world, because the Fegley clan is coming in to take over Hollywood. Winslow Fegley, who is playing the lead role in Night Books, is the younger brother of Oakes Fegley, the kid at the center of Disney’s Pete’s Dragon remake and who’s about to go to war with his grandpa in the Robert De Niro comedy The War With Grandpa. It’s only a matter of time until there’s a Fegley in every major project coming down the pike, so it’s probably in your best interest to go ahead and swear your undying fealty to them now.

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