The director of Oculus is going to take a stab at Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game! Does he have what it takes?

When it was announced that Oculus director Mike Flanagan was going to be steering the adaptation of Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game, the first question was: How? While I haven’t read the novel myself, I’m quite familiar the concern people have with translating King’s pages to the big screen. Those of you that are apprehensive about Flanagan’s approach to the adaptation might feel better knowing that he’s been mulling over the idea for the last ten years or so.  He himself even thought the movie was unfilmable, until recently that is. Here’s what he had to say about Gerald’s Game:

I’ve been wanting to make Gerald’s Game for ten years. I love that novel and I first started trying to acquire the rights around that time. After Oculus came out, King had seen the movie and really liked it, so things finally fell into place for Gerald’s Game. I’m so excited about that, but talk about a difficult movie! If you want to talk about the strange structure of Oculus, Gerald’s Game is really out there.

Gerald’s Game is intimate and contained on a level that’s really exciting from a creative point of view. It’ll be a really strange and exciting movie for an audience, and there’s nothing quite like it. For the longest time, I’d look at that book and be convinced it was unfilmable, but I finished the script late last year and at the moment, I’m convinced it is filmable. It’s a strange one, but we’re casting that right now and hopefully we’ll be going into production on that in late winter or early spring of next year.

So they wont even start filming until next year, which means we’ve got plenty of time to let this one sink in. Flanagan is a great director, and more importantly he knows how to make a complex story feel simple, which I think will be key with this adaptation. Are you confident that Flanagan is the right man for the job? Let me know in the comments!