'Woman in Black' Producer Targets Scary Script 'Gaslight' (Exclusive)

CBS Films

"The Woman in Black"

Coming off the surprise success of its horror movie The Woman in Black, Exclusive Media’s genre arm Hammer has picked up the rights to Gaslight, a spooky thriller written by Ian Fried.

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The screenplay, which landed on Hollywood’s Black List of the best unproduced scripts in 2011, is described as in the vein of From Hell, the Alan Moore Victorian-age Jack the Ripper tale, and The Silence of the Lambs, which famously introduced serial killer Hannibal Lecter to the world.

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In Gaslight, Jack the Ripper, secretly imprisoned in a London insane asylum, is called upon to help Scotland yard solve a series if murders that share the iconic death brand: dual puncture wounds to the neck.

Exclusive’s president of worldwide production and acquisitions Tobin Armbrust will oversee the project for Hammer. The company’s creative exec Jennifer Ruper brought the project in.

Exclusive's co-chairmen Guy East and Nigel Sinclair, as well as Hammer CEO Simon Oakes, are attached to produce.

Gaslight is Fried’s second script to get on the Black List. His dark fantasy The Ever After Murders, featuring fairy tale characters embroiled in a series of murders, landed on the list in 2010. The writer, repped by WME, Prolific Entertainment and attorney Eric Suddleson, is currently working on Spectral, an original supernatural action project set up at Legendary.

Hammer’s Woman in Black, the adaptation of a classic British novel written by Susan Hill that stars Daniel Radcliffe, wowed the industry when it grossed over $21 million last weekend. It was released in the U.S. by CBS Films.

Exclusive, run by Guy East and Nigel Sinclair, is selling at EFM the newly unveiled Can a Song Save Your Life? to star Mark Ruffalo and Scarlett Johansson.

Email: Borys.Kit@thr.com

Twitter: @Borys_Kit