It looks like Matt Reeves isn’t done with vampires yet, and one week after it was announced he would be tackling an adaptation of Ray Nelson‘s short story “8 O’Clock In The Morning” he’s added another potential project to his plate also based on a book.
Justin Cronin‘s celebrated novel “The Passage” is set to make the leap to the big screen courtesy of Fox 2000 and Reeves, according to Deadline. John Logan (“Hugo Cabret,” “Rango,” “The Aviator“) penned the screenplay that is said to be somewhere between “28 Days Later” and “The Stand,” telling the story of cancer patients who are cured by bat bites in South America only for them to turn into a group of indestructible, telepathic vampire masters who infect the population. Check out the Publishers Weekly summary below:
Fans of vampire fiction who are bored by the endless hordes of sensitive, misunderstood Byronesque bloodsuckers will revel in Cronin’s engrossingly horrific account of a post-apocalyptic America overrun by the gruesome reality behind the wish-fulfillment fantasies. When a secret project to create a super-soldier backfires, a virus leads to a plague of vampiric revenants that wipes out most of the population. One of the few bands of survivors is the Colony, a FEMA-established island of safety bunkered behind massive banks of lights that repel the virals, or dracs—but a small group realizes that the aging technological defenses will soon fail. When members of the Colony find a young girl, Amy, living outside their enclave, they realize that Amy shares the virals’ agelessness, but not the virals’ mindless hunger, and they embark on a search to find answers to her condition. PEN/Hemingway Award–winner Cronin (The Summer Guest) uses a number of tropes that may be overly familiar to genre fans, but he manages to engage the reader with a sweeping epic style.
And by the way, this thing is franchise ready. Cronin will be publishing the second in a proposed trilogy, “Twelve,” next year. There’s no word yet on whether “The Passage” or “8 O’Clock” will go first, but the former is apparently further along with Reeves set to supervise a rewrite by a scribe that’s yet to be named. And while we loved “Let Me In” we’re not so sure we want to see Reeves return yet again to vampire lore, but if it has a different spin, we’ll be intrigued to see what it’s all about.
