If there’s something spooky in your film studio, who are you gonna call? Zach Cregger!
The mastermind behind the 2022 horror hit Barbarian, which grossed $45 million against a $4.5 million production budget, has rightfully been on the up and up ever since. Recently, he and his sophomore feature, a “horror epic” in the vein of Magnolia titled Weapons, were the subjects of a bidding war, in which Warner Bros.’ New Line Cinema label ultimately beat out Universal with an eight-figure bid.
Now, per The Hollywood Reporter, Cregger has been roped in for yet another scarefest. Namely, New Line will be tasking him with producing an adaptation of a 39-page short story titled Occupant, in which an old house is moved into a new neighborhood in order to preserve it; a move that may do quite the opposite of preserving the neighborhood’s living residents.
It seems like the only way is skywards for Cregger, who – much like his contemporary Jordan Peele – got his start in internet sketch comedy as the co-founder of famed group The Whitest Kids U’Know, before catapulting himself onto the horror scene with a masterful debut (in Cregger’s case, Barbarian). For such a thing to happen once is a curiosity, but two instances of this could very well indicate a relatively unprecedented paradigm in the entertainment scene.
And if such a paradigm is gifting us talents in the form of Peele and now Cregger, we’ll remain infinitely grateful for this sketch comedy-to-horror maestro pipeline as we hold our breath for a Weapons release date.