Sunday Scaries: The Most Ambitious Horror Movie Ever Made Might Be In Pre-Production Right Now

This weekend saw the release of Whalefall, a survival thriller about a young man getting swallowed by a sperm whale who has a limited amount of time to escape before suffering a horrible death inside the gut of one of the largest animals on Earth, and if that sounds like nightmare fuel to you, hey man, I feel ya, the experience of watching something like that is a big fat N O P E to me, especially since such a scenario is, apparently, scientifically possible (if still mostly unlikely), but Joey liked the film well enough, it seems to have kicked off a trend of trapped-by-or-inside-a-scary-animal thrillers, and most of all has been a boon to the Hollywood stock of Daniel Kraus, the author of the book the movie is based on,

and Kraus already enjoyed a sterling reputation in the horror community, having collaborated with the likes of George A. Romero and Guillermo del Toro and writing nearly two dozen books and graphic novels, of which Whalefall was the first to be adapted into a feature-length film, but it won’t be the last, as it has been reported that Angel Down is in the early stages of development from Imagine Entertainment, and it might become the most ambitious, conceptually risky horror movie of all time, 

because for those of you who haven’t read it, Angel Down takes place during the Meuse-Argonne offensive of World War I, focusing on five soldiers who are sent to an area to investigate the source of an ungodly shrieking noise and to, in all likelihood, put the source of the screams out of its misery, but when they arrive at the source, they don’t find a wounded soldier or even a civilian, they find a literal angel, struck down by artillery fire and tangled up in barbed wire, and from there, things spiral into a twisted nightmare as the angel reveals the darkest impulses of the men who decide to escort her out of the battlefield and find themselves descending into a relentless and oppressive journey through difficult moral choices and human weaknesses set against the backdrop of one of the most viscerally horrific periods in human history,

which blew away readers and critics when it hit bookstores in July 2025, widely celebrated as a Great American Novel and actually won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction earlier this year, which isn’t unprecedented but still very rare for a pure horror novel to achieve, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that something like this would be optioned for a movie deal but it also raises the question of… how, exactly, a filmmaker is even supposed to start tackling a project of this magnitude and expect to break even on it at the box office, since the first world war isn’t nearly as reliable a box office draw as the second, the scale of this story is even larger than Sam Mendes’ gimmicky and thematically shallow 1917 while being far more grueling an experience than Edward Berger’s sanitized take on All Quiet on the Western Front, 

and let’s not forget the spotty track record Pulitzer Prize winners for Fiction have on the adaptation front, at least in the realm of feature films, with The Road having the relatively decent fortune of being received as a mostly okay but still inferior adaptation of a written masterwork on one end and The Goldfinch becoming such an embarrassing critical and box office failure that the source material’s author fired her agent over it on the other end, and while Kraus has more familiarity with the moviemaking process than most Pulitzer Prize-winning novelists and has confirmed that he recently finished the first draft of the script, the fact remains that this is going to be a daunting hill to climb even under the best of circumstances,

as every aspect of this novel defies the conventions of a mainstream film that can attract a sizable audience, with main characters who are hard to like, graphic descriptions of violence and gore, and an angel that **SPOILER ALERT** practically demands additional costs and logistical challenges for any filmmaker, because the angel changes form depending on who is interacting with her at any given time, and yes, sometimes feature film adaptations can muscle through cinematic depictions of highly abstract and difficult-to-visualize characters à la Thandiwe Newton’s rivetingly unhinged portrayal of the seemingly unplayable titular character of the better-than-you-remember adaptation of Beloved, but still, whatever path the writer-director-producer team charts for how to translate the angel from the page to the screen will not be easy and won’t please anyone,

which I’m personally fine with, as truly great movies should not feel obligated to please everyone and far more often than not don’t, like how One Battle After Another seemingly pissed off everyone on both sides of the political spectrum and still ended up being objectively terrific, but then again, I’m not the one putting up the money or the manpower to turn this dizzying gut punch of a supernatural war epic to the big screen, so I must extend a tip of my hat to whoever happens to be dedicated and imaginative and crazy enough to try to tackle what has a very good chance of becoming a horror movie mounted on a scale larger than World War Z, presenting more challenging thematic ideas about war and psychology than Jacob’s Ladder, and potentially pulling off even more logistically daring gambits than The Shining just to adequately capture “the essence” what made the source material such a cultural phenomenon in the first place, as I, someone with relatively meager experience in film production, feel overwhelmed just thinking about overcoming all these myriad challenges in turning Angel Down into a satisfying feature film,

but now I’m curious about how you, dear reader, would go about adapting such a daunting novel cinematically, and encourage you to leave a comment on how you think this project will likely turn out.