The Director of Happy Death Day Is Adapting My Best Friend’s Exorcism

As the horror genre continues to prove box office gold in 2018 and beyond, new properties are being adapted at a rapid pace. One of the rising stars? Author Grady Hendrix, whose novels deftly blend teen comedy and serious horror into a single package. Hendrix has several properties undergoing adaptation, but this one is particularly interesting—Happy Death Day director Christopher Landon is looking to produce (and probably direct) an adaptation of Hendrix’s My Best Friend’s Exorcism. We previously called the book one of the 50 best horror novels of all time in our most recent update to that list. As we wrote then:

Grady Hendrix is building a brand: gimmicky on the outside, surprisingly scary on the inside. Horrorstör, his 2014 horror breakthrough, plopped readers into a haunted faux-IKEA full of torture instruments—beyond what the real-life stores already stock. His follow-up, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, dials back the meta-factor; aside from the yearbook-style packaging, this tale of ’80s gal pals dealing with a demonic intrusion could easily a have been a paperback original during horror’s boom period—and that’s a compliment. Abby and Gretchen are best friends for life on the eve of the first Bush presidency…until Gretchen gets lost in the woods and comes back different. Abby, already an outcast in her swank private school, faces as much peer pressure as she does pea soup in her quest to cleanse her best friend’s soul.

Rights to the film were acquired by Endeavor Content, with Gotham Group and Quirk Books producing—the first film production credit for the company behind such books as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, both of which ended up getting adapted. The script, meanwhile, will be written by Jenna Laima, with Hendrix serving as creative consultant. Landon would probably end up in the director’s chair, although he’s also currently working on the wonderfully titled Happy Death Day sequel, Happy Death Day 2U.

Hendrix, meanwhile, is a busy guy right now. His novel Horrorstör is currently being adapted into a series, while production also just finished on his first original movie, Satanic Panic. He also published a new book, We Sold Our Souls, back in September. Expect to see the author’s name attached to plenty of film and TV projects in the near future.