Doctor Strange and The Black Phone director Scott Derrickson is co-writing with screenwriter C. Robert Cargill another spine-chilling (heavy on the ‘chilling’) terror, Road of Bones. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the film will adapt the 2022 horror novel of the same name, which focuses on an actual location in Siberia steeped in folklore and terror.
The original book written by Christopher Golden, follows a historian who heads to Siberia on the Kolyma Highway, a road paved in a dark history surrounding its makers. Prisoners laid the 2000 km road during the Stalinist Soviet Union era, but due to permafrost, thousands of inmates died on the job, resulting in the road actually being made over them in an effort to cover it up. The unfortunate historian who dares to go out on the highway is greeted by unfathomable horrors and at risk of being stuck on the road forever, forgotten like all the rest.
It certainly sounds like a perfect fit for the pair that have been putting fear in audiences for some time now. While Apple TV Plus’ The Gorge didn’t raise pulses too much, their Ethan Hawke-starring horror The Black Phone certainly did the trick, so much so that a sequel was greenlit and set for release this year on October 17.
Speaking about the film, Derrickson told GamesRadar+, “The main difference is that it’s a high school coming of age movie, in the same way that the original movie was a middle school coming of age movie, but those are two very different sorts of things.” Derrickson broke down the differences, adding, “You know, a high school coming-of-age movie demands more. It has to be more visceral. It has to be, I think, more graphic, scarier.” We’ll see what happens when the phone gets picked up again later this year. In the meantime, check out upcoming horrors worth keeping an eye out for this year here.
