Oscar-winning 1917 co-financier and producer New Republic Pictures has optioned New York Times best-selling author Grady Hendrix’s novel Horrorstör, which they will develop into a feature, reports Deadline.
“The book is set at the Orsk furniture superstore in Cleveland, Ohio where morning, employees arrive to find broken Kjerring bookshelves, shattered Glans water goblets, and smashed Liripip wardrobes. Sales are down, security cameras reveal nothing, and store managers are panicking. To unravel the mystery, three employees volunteer to work a nine-hour dusk-till-dawn shift with plans to patrol the empty showroom floor, investigate strange sights and sounds, and encounter horrors that defy the imagination.”
Hendrix’s debut novel was released by Quirk Books in 2013 and published in over a dozen languages across the world.
“I wrote Horrorstör to be simultaneously funny and scary, while paying tribute to the retail warriors who staff our big box stores,” Hendrix told the site. “I couldn’t be more excited about taking an audience and trapping them overnight with me in the flatpack hell that is Orsk — the ultimate haunted house, full of Infinite aisles, murderous ghosts, and incomprehensible faux-Scandinavian names.”
Formerly set up as a television series with Charlie Kaufman, Gail Berman and Josh Schwartz producing at Fox and then at AMC, Horrorstör is now going the feature route with Hendrix adapting his own material for the first time.
