'Come Closer' Movie Adaptation Coming From 'Black Mirror' And 'Hannibal' Director David Slade

Sara Gran's delectably creepy novel Come Closer is getting the big screen treatment, thanks to filmmaker David Slade. Slade has a long history with the horror genre, having helmed 30 Days of Night, Hard Candy, and episodes of Hannibal and Black Mirror (and also, uh, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse), so tasking him with adapting this truly scary book is a nice choice.  The novel concerns a young, successful woman who slowly starts to become unhinged, and begins to suspect she's possessed by a demon.

If you've never read Sara Gran's Come Closer, you should rectify that immediately. It's only 176 pages, and you can likely breeze through it. I read the whole thing in one afternoon, because I just couldn't put it down. Gran's prose is terse and punchy, and her chapters are short, which makes the overall experience of reading the book fly. And now it's becoming a movie, with David Slade at the helm.

Here's the book's full synopsis:

A recurrent, unidentifiable noise in her apartment. A memo to her boss that's replaced by obscene insults. Amanda—a successful architect in a happy marriage—finds her life going off kilter by degrees. She starts smoking again, and one night for no reason, without even the knowledge that she's doing it, she burns her husband with a cigarette. At night she dreams of a beautiful woman with pointed teeth on the shore of a blood-red sea.

The new voice in Amanda's head, the one that tells her to steal things and talk to strange men in bars, is strange and frightening, and Amanda struggles to wrest back control of her life. A book on demon possession suggests that the figure on the shore could be the demon Naamah, known to scholars of the Kabbalah as the second wife of Adam, who stole into his dreams and tricked him into fathering her child. Whatever the case, as the violence of her erratic behavior increases, Amanda knows that she must act to put her life right, or see it destroyed.

Sounds creepy, right? It is. The book is written in the first person, which puts us inside the quickly unreeling mind of Amanda. The tale recalls films like Possession and Repulsion, with a little Rosemary's Baby thrown in for flavor. Slade's direction is solid, and if he finds the right actress for the lead, I have a feeling Come Closer is going to turn out to be a highly effective horror film.