EXCLUSIVE: Paramount Primal, the studio’s new genre label led by J.D. Lifshitz and Raphael Margules, has acquired rights to The Troop, the 2014 horror novel by Nick Cutter, enlisting Chris Basler to pen the feature adaptation.
The Troop follows a troop of boys who, while on their annual scout camping trip, encounter an intruder who unleashes something far more terrifying than any campfire ghost story. As fear spreads, a brutal struggle for survival begins, turning the boys against the infected… and each other.
Cutter is the pseudonym for USA Today bestseller Craig Davidson, whose novel won the James Herbert Award for Horror Writing.
Lyrical Media, the company behind Adam Wingard’s A24 action thriller Onslaught and the upcoming Osgood Perkins film The Young People, is set to produce the feature take, with Tracy Rosenblum overseeing the project for Paramount Primal.
Previously, Basler has developed projects for both film and television with Blumhouse, Bad Robot, Annapurna, the Picture Co., Tango, Hivemind, Cloud Nine, and the Black List, among others. He is repped by UTA, Untitled, and Ziffren Brittenham.
As Nick Cutter, Davidson is also known for books like The Dorians, The Deep, Little Heaven, The Queen, and The Handyman Method, co-written with Andrew F. Sullivan. Fiction written under his own name includes Rust and Bone, The Saturday Night Ghost Club, and the short story collection Cascade. He is repped by UTA and Kirby Kim at Janklow & Nesbit Associates.
Formally unveiled in July, Paramount Primal kicked things off with a bang with the announcement of a new A Nightmare on Elm Street movie, to be released domestically by Paramount. Currently in production on Tyler Falbo’s R-rated comedy Boys for Life, they’re simultaneously developing the R-rated fantasy Tower Defense from writer Evan Daugherty, along with the high-concept thriller Sweet Spot penned by Nic Curcio and Kirby Gladstein.
