Fox Digs into New Yorker Archive for New Haunted House Film
Steve Barton
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What’s old is new again. At least that’s the case when it comes to a story which ran in the May 16, 1936, issue of The New Yorker. Deadline is reporting that a nearly 80-year old article in the magazine about the first documented haunted house has scared up a deal at Fox Searchlight.
Searchlight will develop a movie from “Voices Through the Trumpet,” a two-part article written by Carl Carmer. JT Petty has been set to write, and Alison Greenspan is producing with Conde Nast Entertainment’s Dawn Ostroff and Jeremy Steckler. Denise DiNovi will be executive producer.
Conde Nast Entertainment was set up partly to cull through titles in the libraries of its many magazines, but you rarely see anybody going this far back in the archives to find movie material. Carmer, a journalist and author who wrote about myths and folklore, died in 1976, but the New Yorker piece he got published in 1936 has a chance to live on.
“Voices Through the Trumpet” takes place in the mid-1800s; the first haunted house was documented in upstate New York. Two young girls, the Fox sisters, were at the center of the haunting. They remained in touch with a spirit that haunted them as they grew up. When they reached adulthood, both girls disavowed the haunting, then promptly died mysteriously. Years later Carmer ventured back to the haunted house and the spiritualist community that sprung up around it to try to figure out what really happened and was met with terrifying answers.
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