Sam Raimi's Cursed Horror Project Finally Escapes Development Hell
After five years trapped in limbo at Netflix, Sam Raimi's haunted-house thriller Every House Is Haunted has found a new home at 20th Century Studios. The move puts one of horror's most-discussed "lost" projects back on track, and it's bringing in the directing duo behind one of last year's most talked-about Netflix thrillers to finally get it made.
From Short Story to Stalled Production
Every House Is Haunted traces back to Ian Rogers' 2012 short story collection of the same name, specifically the piece "The House on Ashley Avenue." Producer Roy Lee first optioned the story more than a decade ago for a Universal television adaptation that never came together. The film version, scripted by Jason Pagan and Andrew Deutschman, follows an insurance investigator sent to debunk a couple's claim that a haunted house caused their deaths — only to find his skepticism crumbling as a psychic and a string of unexplainable events start closing in on him.
Director Corin Hardy (The Nun) was attached to helm the project about five years ago, but it stalled before cameras ever rolled. Netflix picked up development afterward and sat on it for years without moving the film into production — a frustrating pattern genre fans have watched play out with more than a few promising horror scripts.
New Directors, Same Producing Team
Now the project is restarting with Adam Schindler and Brian Netto in the director's chairs, the pair who broke through last year with the Netflix survival thriller Don't Move. The producing team carries over largely intact: Sam Raimi and Zainab Azizi are producing through Raimi Productions, alongside Roy Lee and Andrew Childs for Vertigo Entertainment, with Ian Rogers and Starlight Media serving as executive producers.
Raimi's involvement is the real headline here. Best known to horror fans for launching the Evil Dead franchise and shaping decades of genre filmmaking through Ghost House Pictures, Raimi has spent recent years mostly behind the camera on blockbuster fare like Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. A haunted-house story rooted in a short-fiction collection is a return to the kind of ground-level horror that built his reputation in the first place, even if he's producing rather than directing this time around.
Schindler and Netto, meanwhile, get a chance to build on the buzz from Don't Move, which turned a stripped-down premise — a woman racing against a paralytic agent while fleeing a killer — into one of the more effective thrillers Netflix put out that year. Moving from a tight survival thriller to a haunted-house mystery with a skeptic-turned-believer arc is a different kind of challenge, but it's the sort of tonal range that can make a directing team's career.
What This Means Going Forward
No cast has been announced yet, and there's no production start date on the record. Projects that migrate between studios after years in development don't always move quickly once they land — but the fact that Raimi, Lee, and Childs all stayed attached through the jump from Netflix to 20th Century suggests real confidence in the material, not just a shelf-clearing sale.
For horror fans who've tracked this one since the Corin Hardy days, the attachment of two directors coming off a genuine hit is the strongest sign yet that Every House Is Haunted might actually make it to a screen.
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