**Empire **has a friend who once moved into a dodgy rented property and found three grand in cash in a paper bag on top of a wardrobe. What actually happened was that he and his flatmates kept very quiet about it for six months and then spent it (they also moved). What they must have feared happening was something akin to the set up of Stash House**, now in motion at Joel Silver and Robert Zemeckis' Dark Castle productions.
Stash House involves a young couple moving into a starter home to begin their perfect new life, only to then be terrorised by a dangerous criminal gang who want something from inside the house. It's being pitched as Panic Room meets The Strangers, which means the villains will be an entirely silent masked Manson family, and the victim couple will be mysteriously adept at complicated phone rewiring. Or something.
It's based on a spec script by Gary Spinelli, whose The Highest Bid, about an art dealer getting mixed up with gangsters, is also in the early stages of development at Intrepid Pictures.
Neither project has a start date or a director yet.