Seth Grahame-Smith came in for a high level of opprobrium thanks to the disappointing one-two punch of his scripts for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (which he adapted from his book) and Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows. It doesn’t seem to have done his career too much hard, however. He’s still busy writing the Beetlejuice sequel and is now set to direct a new version of Ray Bradbury’s classic novel Something Wicked This Way Comes for Disney.
The Mouse House has form adapting this book, having brought it to screens back in 1983. Now, though, a new generation may get to be terrified by Mr. Dark and his travelling carnival, trading unspoken dreams for the awful price of small town residents’ souls.
According to Grahame-Smith, it’s something he’s long dreamed of working on, and he went to Disney with an idea to distil the book more successfully than he thought the first attempt managed.
“I have been so crazy about this book, and it was such a formative title in my life that I actually wrote a piece on NPR about why it is so important for young males to read,” he tells Deadline. “It is a classic coming-of-age, father-son story about the transition from childhood to adulthood and how kids can’t wait to be adults and adults romanticize their childhoods. I’m not remaking the movie; I want the haunted atmosphere that makes the book so chilling, and I want to reinstate some of the classic scenes from the book that were missing from the ’83 film.”
With his Beetle-duties keeping him busy on the writing front, he’ll work on a Something Wicked treatment that will then be handed to another scriptwriter to flesh out into a script. He’s also been working on a sequel book to his Abraham Lincoln adventures. Will the axe-handy president go after zombies this time?