It has been over a week since we last reported on a Stephen King adaptation, so we’re overdue on some news about a Hollywood studio digging an old short story out of obscurity and updating it for our modern world. Today, that short story is King’s The Boogeyman, which was first published in 1973 and then recollected as part of King’s Night Shift collection in 1978. According to Deadline, it has been picked up by 20th Century Fox for an adaptation written by A Quiet Place’s Scott Beck and Bryan Woods.
The original story focuses on a man named Lester Billings telling a psychiatrist about the mysterious and seemingly unrelated deaths of his three young children. Lester says they all screamed about the Boogeyman the nights they were killed and each one was found with their closet door slightly ajar, causing him to believe that an actual supernatural creature is terrorizing his family. If that sounds familiar, Deadline notes that the story has already been adapted into short films many times, with King regularly giving aspiring filmmakers non-commercial rights to The Boogeyman so they can tell a story they’d otherwise never be able to afford.