In May 2014, it was first reported that Mike Flanagan, the director of Relativity Media’s Oculus (2013) and the Netflix’s Hush (2016), was set to direct a film adaptation of Stephen King’s 1992 suspense novel, Gerald’s Game, based on a script Flanagan wrote with his Oculus and Before I Wake collaborator, Jeff Howard.
Since then, there’s been no further news on the project … until now. While promoting his upcoming film Ouija: Origin of Evil, Flanagan, a self-professed Stephen King fan who knew he wanted to turn Gerald’s Game into a movie the moment he finished reading it, says that the positive reception Hush received on the popular streaming site resulted in Netflix getting involved with Gerald’s Game.
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“All of Netflix’s numbers are proprietary, so I don’t get to look at them, but the way I’ve heard people talking, it’s been viewed an amazing number of times, and the reception has been very, very positive,” Flanagan told Rue Morgue. “Coincidentally, Stephen King watched Hush at home on Netflix and tweeted about it, which kind of blew my mind. And that got us talking about Gerald’s Game again.
“If you know the source material,” he continued, “you’ll know there are a lot of challenges inherent in that story. Not so much the narrative challenges of how to adapt it; it took me 10 years of constantly thinking about the book to crack the cinematic version. But it’s a real challenge for financiers and distributors, who say, ‘Yeah, we love your work, we love Stephen King, but this story, this particular story? We don’t know how it works,’ without reshaping it to fit a much more conventional structure, which I did not want to do. And Netflix, because of how well
Hush has done, said, ‘We’re really interested in this, and we’d like to do it the way you want to do it.’ And that eliminated the pressure of having to test-screen the movie and define the demographic that’s going to watch it—all of that stuff that typically comes into the conversation when you’re trying to figure out how to market a film for a wide theatrical release. It just cleared the table, so that I can make the movie I want to make. I’m hoping very much that we can get that movie up on its feet soon.”
Gerald and Jessie Burlingame have gone to their summer home on a warm weekday in October for a romantic interlude. After being handcuffed to her bedposts, Jessie tires of her husband’s games, but when Gerald refuses to stop she lashes out at him with deadly consequences. Still handcuffed, she is trapped and alone. Painful memories from her childhood bedevil her. Her only company is a hungry stray dog and the sundry voices that populate her mind. As night comes, she is unsure whether it is her imagination or if she has another companion: someone watching her from the corner of her dark bedroom.
