The adaptation of Paul Tremblay’s horror novel A Head Full of Ghosts has found a new director. Deadline reports that Crazy Heart and Black Mass director Scott Cooper has signed on to direct, and that the project will star Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s Margaret Qualley.
Tremblay’s novel debuted in 2015 to widespread acclaim. In it, 23-year-old Meredith Barrett (presumably played by Qualley), recounts a horrific period in her family’s past to an internet writer named Rachel Neville.
When Meredith — who goes by Merry — was 8 years old, her sister Marjorie began acting strangely. Their father decides that she has been possessed by a demon, and works to get an exorcism, and also agrees for the family to be the focus of a reality TV show called The Possession, which further disrupts their lives.
The project has been in the works since 2015, when Focus Features and Robert Downey Jr.’s production company Team Downey preemptively picked up the rights to Tremblay’s novel prior to its publication. In 2018, Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House) signed on to rewrite the script and direct the film, but he seems to have left the project.
Deadline didn’t say when the project would begin production or when it would be released. A Head Full of Ghosts isn’t the only project from Tremblay currently in the adaptation pipeline: FilmNation picked up the rights to his last novel in 2018, The Cabin at the End of the World, about a home invasion with potentially post-apocalyptic overtones.
