In an exclusive, EW is reporting that David Katzenberg and Seth Grahame-Smith (the men behind KatzSmith productions) have bought the movie rights to the Doug Dorst novel ‘Alive in Necropolis’.
‘Alive in Necropolis’ is about a young police officer who lives in Colma, California where the dead outnumber the living. He becomes obsessed with the mysterious fate of the police officer he replaced as he realizes he shares something in common with his predecessor: he can both see and hear the dead. As he delves deeper into the mystery, he wonders if he is losing his mind or if some of the residents of the town are not resting in peace as they should be.
The success in combining the actual history of the town of Colma with supernatural overtones brought the novel to the attention of Katzenberg and Grahame-Smith. As Grahame-Smith puts it:
“[Colma] was founded when people in San Francisco realized they were running out of real-estate. They exhumed all the bodies and graveyard markers to this town, making it basically a kind of city of the dead. The book is about a murder mystery, told through the eyes of a young detective who may or may not be going crazy, and may or may not be seeing ghosts that are helping him. It’s a very rainy streets, brooding, straight-forward supernatural thriller”
Dorst’s novel has been heralded on Amazon.com as a brilliant novel that combines police procedure with black humor, teen angst and a ghost story reminiscent of a blend of Paul Auster, Kevin Brockmeier and Joss Whedon. Katzenberg and Grahame-Smith hope to bring this novel to life by giving it a ‘Chinatown’ or ‘Se7en’ ambiance with the eeriness of ‘The Sixth Sense.’
There is no mention as to whether Grahame-Smith will be writing the screenplay although he has written the scripts for ‘Dark Shadows’, ‘Abraham Lincoln:Vampire Hunter’, ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’ and is currently developing ‘Beetlejuice 2’ with partner Katzenberg. Regardless, the novel sounds intriguing enough that I may read the book before the movie is out! How about you? Does this sound like a movie you’d want to see?
