Twilight author Stephenie Meyer is adapting Kendare Blake’s YA ghost story Anna Dressed in Blood (from Tor Teen) for the big screen, Deadline reports, and the leads have just been announced. Cameron Monaghan (Shameless) will star as Cas Lowood, who is tasked with killing the dead—destroying ghosts that have stayed on for unfinished business, especially of the murderous sort. But when he comes across a deserted Victorian that has claimed the lives of everyone who enters it, he finds that the ghost, known as Anna Dressed in Blood (Maddie Hasson, who stars on Freeform’s Twisted) is less killer than cursed.
Blake also excitedly shared the news on Twitter:
Holy bunch of swear words. ANNA DRESSED IN BLOOD MOVIE NEWS! I’m too excited to even tweet properly. https://t.co/Tj1Yl1HwlN
— Kendare Blake (@KendareBlake) May 3, 2016
Meyer will produce a screenplay from Anna Wood, to be directed by Trish Sie—who just directed OK Go’s music video for “Upside Down & Inside Out,” which was shot entirely in weightlessness. Here’s more about Anna Dressed in Blood:
Cas Lowood has inherited an unusual vocation: He kills the dead.
So did his father before him, until he was gruesomely murdered by a ghost he sought to kill. Now, armed with his father’s mysterious and deadly athame, Cas travels the country with his kitchen-witch mother and their spirit-sniffing cat. They follow legends and local lore, destroy the murderous dead, and keep pesky things like the future and friends at bay.
Searching for a ghost the locals call Anna Dressed in Blood, Cas expects the usual: track, hunt, kill. What he finds instead is a girl entangled in curses and rage, a ghost like he’s never faced before. She still wears the dress she wore on the day of her brutal murder in 1958: once white, now stained red and dripping with blood. Since her death, Anna has killed any and every person who has dared to step into the deserted Victorian she used to call home.
Yet she spares Cas’s life.
And in the meantime, read Shannon Stoker’s thoughts on Anna Dressed in Blood.
