There's a movie coming out that's based on a viral Twitter thread about a ghost child. That bodes well for Hollywood (really!)
The trailer for "Dear David," a horror film based on Adam Ellis' viral Twitter thread, released Wednesday.
It's been in development for several years, and just the latest example of the plucked-from-Twitter movie trend.
More stories originating on social media, like the horror subreddit r/NoSleep, will follow.
On Wednesday, Lionsgate released the first trailer for "Dear David," an upcoming horror film about a BuzzFeed employee who's haunted by a seemingly malevolent ghost boy. If that premise sounds familiar, that's because it's (as the trailer proclaims) "inspired by actual events" — aka, adapted from a Twitter thread that went viral back in 2017.
Adam Ellis, an artist and former BuzzFeed employee, dominated social media with the tale of a supposed haunting he was experiencing in his New York City apartment. He kicked it off on August 7, 2017 with a tweet that read: "So, my apartment is currently being haunted by the ghost of a dead child and he's trying to kill me. (thread)." From there, it became the stuff of internet legend — and Ellis got a movie deal off it in 2018.
This isn't the first plucked-from-Twitter film that'll be hitting our screens. In 2020, A24 released "Zola," from writer-director Janicza Bravo, which was adapted from a 148-tweet thread written by Detroit waitress A'Ziah "Zola" King about her chaotic misadventures taking a trip to Florida with a stripper acquaintance. It was well-received by critics.
We'll have to see if "Dear David" is any good when it's out in October — I, for one, will be seeing it, given that I'm a horror fiend compelled to watch anything and everything spooky. But regardless, the long-gestating movie is an interesting proof that more and more filmmakers are stepping outside of the typical venues for story ideas in favor of the good old internet. (Maybe not Twitter, though, because that place is kind of a trash fire and probably bound for irrelevance soon enough.)
Another interesting source of content? The subreddit r/NoSleep, a community of over 17.6 million Redditors where writers share immersive, first-person horror stories that readers collectively agree to pretend are all true. r/NoSleep has been around for 13 years, according to the subreddit page, and it's already produced multiple stories that are being eyed for film adaptations. In 2018, Variety reported that Ryan Reynolds would be producing a movie based on "The Patient Who Nearly Drove Me Out of Medicine," which originated as a nine-part series of posts on the subreddit. Steven Spielberg acquired the movie rights to "The Spire in the Woods," a 10-post r/NoSleep series, in 2019.
More recently, Deadline reported that Netflix had won the rights to "My Wife And I Bought A Ranch" in a bidding war, making a "low-seven-figure commitment" to bring the six-part Reddit story to the screen. And in April, Deadline reported that another r/NoSleep story, "Purgatory Games," would be adapted into a movie.
It's a promising and welcome trend in Hollywood, where re-treads of classics and endless adaptations of old IP have been the norm for years.
Read the original article on Insider
