Scott Hampton’s 1993 comic book The Upturned Stone is finally getting a movie adaptation after more than three decades of waiting. Over the years, the comic has gained cult classic status among the graphic novel community, and it is widely regarded as one of the scariest horror stories ever told in the medium. The upcoming film will be directed by Anky Cyriaque and produced by Story is King Pictures, with Hampton himself writing the screenplay.
Set in 1969, the graphic novel follows four pre-teen boys who are given $2 by one of their mothers to buy a pumpkin for Halloween. But instead of buying one, they decide to keep the money for themselves and take home a large pumpkin that was growing out of the grave of an anonymous teenager. The mother makes a pie out of that pumpkin and serves it to the boys. Soon after, the boys begin to have nightmares about the murdered teenager buried in that grave. What’s even stranger is that every boy experiences a different part of the same dream. When they start piecing their visions together, they uncover clues about the boy’s murder and realize that the killer might still be out there.
The Upturned Stone feels like a mix of Stephen King’s It and Stand By Me movies, with bits and pieces of Stranger Things and The Black Phone. It’s part ghost story, part serial killer mystery, and part coming-of-age tale. The dream sequences in the comic are especially disturbing, filled with surreal imagery and psychological horror that sticks long after reading. If those scenes are recreated faithfully, they could easily rival the nightmares of A Nightmare on Elm Street or the more recent Black Phone 2.
This Isn’t the First Time an ‘Upturned Stone’ Film Adaptation Has Been Announced
This new film isn’t the first attempt to bring The Upturned Stone to life. Back in 2005, David Foster Productions, the studio behind hits like The Thing and The Mask of Zorro, picked up the rights to the comic. But the project eventually fell apart. More than a decade later, around 2017, another production company tried to develop a version of the film, but that too never materialized. In an old interview with Pursue News, Hampton explained that the movie never happened because of creative differences. Studios couldn’t seem to understand the tone or story he wanted to tell.
“They wanted to turn it into something it wasn’t,” Hampton said at the time. “The studio wanted a typical slasher movie or a more violent horror story. For Hampton, The Upturned Stone was never meant to be a slasher film or a torture-heavy horror movie. It was a coming-of-age story. Because of that, studios at the time thought his version wasn’t marketable enough. They didn’t see what made it special.
But perhaps Hampton’s story was simply ahead of its time. Over the past decade, coming-of-age horror has become one of the most popular trends in Hollywood. Stranger Things has become a global phenomenon, and it is one of Netflix’s biggest success stories. Both It movies were huge box office and critical successes. In fact, 2017’s It still holds the record as the highest-grossing horror movie ever made, with a worldwide gross of $704 million. More recently, both The Black Phone movies and IT: Welcome to Derry have shown that coming-of-age horror stories continue to connect with audiences and critics alike. That’s why now feels like the perfect time for The Upturned Stone to finally be made. After all these years and false starts, maybe this time, the story that terrified comic readers will finally reach the big screen.
via Collider