The Killing of a Sacred Deer and The Favourite director Yorgos Lanthimos may have found his next project, with THR reporting that the filmmaker is in talks to helm an adaptation of Richard Brautigan’s 1974 Gothic Western novel The Hawkline Monster.
The book “tells of two unlikely hero gunslingers hired by a 15-year-old girl named Magic Child to kill the monster that lives in ice caves under the basement of a house inhabited by a young woman named Miss Hawkline.”
The Hawkline Monster was first optioned for the screen by Hal Ashby, who spent more than a decade trying to get an adaptation off the ground, with Jack Nicholson and Dustin Hoffman and Jeff and Beau Bridges attached at different points. Following Ashby’s death in 1988, Tim Burton also attempted to launch an adaptation starring Clint Eastwood and Jack Nicholson.
New Regency picked up the rights to The Hawkline Monster earlier this year, with Roy Lee (It), Andrew Trapani (Winchester) and Steven Schneider (Pet Sematary) set to produce alongside Lanthimos.