Josh Boone is currently attached to direct Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles and Stephen King’s The Stand, and now he’s signed on to adapt and direct the movie adaptation of another horror-tinged novel, and another Stephen King one at that.
Deadline reports that The Fault In Our Stars director has written and will direct a film based on King’s recent supernatural novel Revival. The book, which was published in 2014, is about “a charismatic preacher who loses his faith when his wife and child are killed in a tragic accident. Unhinged from the religion that grounded and gave him a conscience, the preacher becomes ruthless in his experimentation into the healing but dangerous power of electrical current, positioning him to act as God-like faith healer and opening a terrifying Pandora’s Box. Intertwined with the preacher is a young man with demons of his own, who has benefited from the preacher’s talents and becomes a reluctant accomplice to his deadly obsession.”
As previously mentioned, Boone isn’t exactly short on projects (he’s also linked to a standalone X-Men movie X-Men: The New Mutants), but he’s looking to make Revival this year and has apparently started lining up actors.
Deadline also reaffirms Boone’s commitment to the long, long-gestating adaptation of The Stand. Apparently he’s got the script written and “verbal commitments” from plenty of actors, but Warner Bros’ option has lapsed and it’s up to CBS Studios to figure out which studio they want to set it up with (Lionsgate is mentioned as an option).
While we kind of want Boone to hurry up and get on with The Stand and The Vampire Chronicles, Revival is definitely a King novel that could work beautifully on the big screen, and there’s some nice quotes in the Deadline article about his attachment to the author.
“I’ve read every book Stephen King has written, multiple times; he taught me how to write characters,” Boone said. When I read The Stand, it was literally from under my bed. I was raised by evangelical Christians, who believed in The Rapture. I wasn’t allowed to read Stephen King books for a large part of my childhood. I ripped the cover off this Frank E. Peretti book This Present Darkness, a Christian bestseller, and put it on The Stand, because they were roughly the same size. I would read these books under the bed and hide them in the box spring, like normal kids stashed their pornography. My mom found my King stash and they burned the books in the fireplace. I still have a picture in a photo album of this giant pile of ashes in my parents’ fireplace.”
“When I read Revival, I was like, man, did you write this for me? I’d been on both sides of that pendulum. I call myself a non-believer, now, and when I moved to LA, it was like Neo being pulled out of The Matrix. Oh, my god, none of that stuff is true! But it was what I’d been taught and what I believed in since childhood. I believed in the devil, in Jesus, and even now as a non-believer, I’m still fascinated by that world and Revival is the scariest thing he’s written since Pet Sematary. He tricks you, drawing you in gently, with that narrator’s voice and a long time span that reminds you of The Shawshank Redemption or The Green Mile, and then he pulls that rug from under you in that last act and you’re like, oh my god, what have I gotten myself into? The secret of electricity starts as this wonderful thing and it gets progressively darker. Jamie calls Charles on it, but sticks around, because he, like the rest of us, wants to know what’s on the other side. It’s powerhouse stuff, and two of the best characters he has written since Annie Wilkes [played by Kathy Bates in an Oscar-winning turn in Misery]. I still intend to make The Stand, but I need more time, and when I asked Steve about Revival, he put me together with Mike De Luca.”
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