Oliver Jackson-Cohen Nine Times

All nine episodes of The Haunting of Bly Manor is dropping on Netflix this Friday -- in case you're all like "the what of the what what" Bly would be the second series from The Haunting of Hill House creator Mike Flanagan (watch the trailer here), based on the Henry James story The Turn of the Screw and starring many the same actors as that earlier run of episodes, including our furry prince Mr. Oliver Jackson-Cohen. Hi Olly! 

Olly here is featured in the new issue of InStyle, both as a photoshoot (which I am now sharing with you) and an interview, which you can read at this link. Quote quote: "I'm six-foot-three, I'm a big man." There's context but... I dunno 'bout you but that's all I need for today to make it through. He's a big man.  As if we had any doubt. Hit the jump for more of the big man...

Pics of the Day

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 Vanity Fair has our first look images at The Haunting of Bly Manor, the second Haunting series from Netflix and Mike Flanagan after 2018's The Haunting of Hill House -- this new series of episodes has several of the same actors (including our favorite fur monster Oliver Jackson-Cohen, seen above) returning as new characters in a tale that centers on several Henry James ghost stories, most specifically The Turn of the Screw, about a governess taking care of two children in a haunted house. 

That story has of course been adapted into a film several times, including a stone-cold classic with Deborah Kerr in The Innocents in 1961, and then not quite a stone-cold classic (although I think it's a little underrated) with Mackenzie Davis in The Turning last year. Anyway read what they've all got to say at VF (plus a few more images) and we'll see how this iteration works out some time this fall (they haven't set a specific release date yet).

Hangman, Hangman, Slack Your Rope Awhile

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"I read your story. It made me feel thrillingly horrible." That's what Rose (Odessa Young) says when she first meets the writer Shirley Jackson (our queen Elisabeth Moss) at a party, and that is also what I would say if I met writer, director, and hard-edged genius Josephine Decker about this, her latest phenomenal film called, plain and simply as an unflattering flower blouse rimmed with ink stains around its edges, Shirley. Everybody does get that "thrillingly horrible" is high praise, right? This is a movie that demands of its audience first and foremost an understanding of that fact. 

This is a movie that actually demands a lot from its audience -- patience, a nose in the dirt, an ear for insect thrumming. A cursory knowledge of Shirley Jackson herself would most definitely help -- the caustic recluse author of The Haunting of Hill House and the short story The Lottery, among many a tale of odd girls out, is seen here working on her 1951 book called Hangsaman (that title's a reference to an old folk song about a spoilt woman trying to bribe her executioner) which itself aims to tell the real-life story of a local girl who had recently mysteriously disappeared. As much as the movie Shirley is anything -- a biopic, a showcase for Elisabeth Moss again doing her ever astonishing thing -- it's also a whiff of a detective story, as Jackson sniffs out her spin on the girl's story, and why she's personally drawn to it. And you get the sense, skirt high, that Decker is there looking over Shirley's shoulder, doing the same hard inspections down upon these, her own frosty unknowable folks.

And that's where and how our Rose, innocent as the shallow grave caked under her nails, comes in. At the start of the story, literally -- she and her husband Fred (Logan Lerman) arrive at that party at Jackson's house, the one where she lives with her professor husband Stanley (Michael Stuhlbarg), as guests that Stanley's invited to stay til they find their own place. Oh and maybe do some cooking, some cleaning, and some managing of his mad wife while's they at it. Fred's a professor incoming at the local college where Stanley also profs, and yes if this hard-drinking partner-swapping literary four-way has you thinking of Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf? that can hardly, at any moment, be considered a fraudulent claim.

Shirley takes one rough look at Rose, with her "thrillingly horrible"'d self, sizes her up, and with a barely-perceived smirk sees for herself a fine challenge -- she also perceptively sniffs out a baby, rightly, calling Rose with child on the spot. And so from there our dual tale spins forth of two married women, one flush with youth and sex (did I mention how reading about a woman getting stoned in The Lottery led Rose's hand right into hubby Logan Lerman's hot little lap?) and one with a little less of both but lots more of lots else -- each woman giving their own slow, pained births a show, a dance, a shimmy. Rose to a baby that seems to gladly spill a smidge of her sanity out with it, and Shirley to her book, the birthing of which seems to, alternately, straighten her out. One goes up, one comes down, they meet crashing knees in the center.

Each woman rubs off on the other, in their little big ways, but Moss' Shirley is a heftier vampire, stocky with practice and scotch -- watch the way she snaps her fangs at the Dean's wife and tuck away promising party-tricks for your own future. Meanwhile the linoleum creaks and the plaster gives up any and all its ghosts -- weather stains the ceiling while heavy curtains pop emphatic with dust, hot air, the searching paws of drunken over-educated men. You can smell the red wine soaked into every cushion, and Decker's camera skiffs on the motes overhead, in and out of focus. Shirley says things like "worms as fat as fingers" and the ladies discuss Freud, strangling, the breadth of the world's many killer mushrooms.

On that note many a "killer mushroom" movie's graced the past decade and Shirley slides in nicely alongside them -- alongside Phantom Thread, which its generous allowances for brilliant mean artists, and alongside Sofia Coppola's The Beguiled, with its creaky moss-piled house full of madwomen in the rafters, howling, smashing menfolk around. I'd also drop Shirley in alongside the best of Small College Town Academia Greats -- it'd make a helluva two-fer with my Wonder Boys, long beloved, as well as the aforementioned Virginia Woolf. People hold their liquor pooling in the beds of their fangs, their incisive wits and opinions.

The film's criss-crossing pathways for women in this world, the creative processes with which they put out living objects, be they breathing or book, is its bread and butter, for Decker and for her girls -- her commiseration with and inspiration at the hands of the aggressive and off-putting, with women whose heads are so full of thoughts they melt the paint off with their breath, is fire and ice and religion to me. The man's song starts and over it the soundtrack fills with scratching, barking dogs, crowds of insects and owls, the inside of an exhausted happy woman's mouth as she smiles and pictures the abyss flush with morning.

You can find a list of "virtual cinemas"
that are screening Shirley as of today at this link.
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I've Seen the Future, Brother, It Is Redrum

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"That's odd. The blood usually gets off on the second floor." 

Try as hard as I might that line from The Simpsons' Shining parody was always skittering around the edges of my brain while watching the 40-year-delayed sequel Doctor Sleep, until eventually, like that indefatigable blood itself, I couldn't hold it back any longer -- it came pouring out everywhere all over everything. So heavy is the weight of iconography attached to the Overlook and its dark descendants -- they cannot, they will not, be contained. 

At times that spooky weight worked in Sleep's favor -- when we do finally make it back to the Hotel, as we must, you do feel the same passage of time that Adult Danny Torrance (Ewan McGregor) seems to -- we too now have creaks in our musty bones and crevasses around our exhausted eyes; the  radiators are quaking and the little boys in chunky astronaut sweaters are no more on either side of the screen. It goosed its old riffs good. But more often than not I felt Doctor Sleep crumbled under the weight of its impossible expectations and the blood, loosed, drowned the poor dear. 

It's not a bad film. (Rebecca Ferguson, that queen, certainly does her best.) But it actually doesn't even entirely feel like a "film" to me -- it feels more like a miniseries, something director Mike Flanagan has proven himself a sturdy captain of with his Haunting of Hill House series for Netflix, about to disclose its own second anthology. On Netflix Doctor Sleep could have been another hour or two longer and I would've gobbled it up with absent-minded and perfectly mild satisfaction on my face -- dull-eyed and entertained.

On the big screen though, as those familiar strings descend and the REDRUMS pile up and multiple actors are forced to do their best Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall impersonations, I don't know, I just kept being forced into the corner of thinking upon other people's really strange and daring creations. Flanagan is a good, solid filmmaker who in 2019 can't possibly live up to the shit Stanley Kubrick pulled with that 1980 film. It's a task for a crazy person; Mike Flanagan isn't that.

The film's better than it has any right being -- Flanagan's made a career out of that exact sentiment time and time again. There are scenes of genuine fucked-up-ness in Doctor Sleep that a totally by-the-numbers person wouldn't have accomplished. But there's nothing truly scarifying, and there's not much that I think will stand as its own legacy, un-borrowed from betters. Even the film's grossest practical effect is a thing Flanagan himself pulled with his last King adaptation Gerald's Game (which remains  at this point the best thing he's done).

Doctor Sleep is an entertaining tribute to a monumental thing. It's a bowl of colorful fruits laid out in front of a forever monolith, one that reaches black to the stars and blots out so much that came after --the gods will not be angry for this sacrifice. But I'd rather we build our own gods, defiled and deranged and pink with present tense, to suit our modern purposes. The blood came and went awhile back; I long for some new flesh. 

When Michiel Met Mary

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The most beautiful man in the world has gotten a new job! Michiel Huisman of Game of Thrones and The Haunting of Hill House fame, who was most recently seen running around with Chris Evans in a speedo and less, is going to co-star opposite the amazing and seriously under-valued Mary Elizabeth Winstead in Kate, an action flick that has Winstead playing a bad-ass assassin who has 24 hours to find and get her revenge on the man who poisoned her. 24 hours cuz she dies in 24 hours, see? Très Crank.

Anyway Variety doesn't say who Huisman is playing, if he's playing the poisoner, or maybe just the most beautiful man in the world, or perhaps both -- who knows? All I do know is that I went looking for a new picture of Michiel to go along with this news and I found not just the remainder of that Man About Town shoot we shared a couple shots from nearly an entire year ago -- I also found a video that went with the shoot, which I went and giffed the hell out of. See it all after the jump...

The Olly Flood Gates Have Opened

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I almost posted this last night but two Oliver Jackson-Cohen posts within a couple of hours of each other felt like overkill, and also I was birthday lazy yesterday. But news that we'd been expecting finally broke yesterday afternoon, not long after I'd posted the news that Oliver's also playing the Invisible Man, that he is returning to the "Haunting" franchise that Netflix began with their Hill House series -- the second series is going by the title The Haunting of Bly Manor and it sounds like they're ripping off pardon me borrowing the story from Henry James' legendary ghost tale Turn of the Screw, with a new governess type (played by Victoria Pedretti, who was "Nell" on the Hill House season), and her kiddie charges getting tormented by manor-bound specters and spooks. According to OJC "he will play a 'charming young man' named Peter" on Bly but that's all we know so far. I have long suspected that Oliver's Peter is plenty charming, so I look forward to finally making his acquaintance.
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I See (Through) You, Oliver

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Although you'd think he was a massive movie star if you went by how much we talk about him here on MNPP, The Haunting of Hill House and Man in an Orange Shirt actor Oliver Jackson-Cohen hasn't really had that big role that's broken him out yet. He first caught our eye in 2011 when he was up for the lead role of Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter (and don't tell me you can't see him in that role) and then next a couple years later when he got cast on NBC's Dracula series with Thomas Kretschmann. A near decade of smaller roles here and there followed that we always took note of, all leading to this weekend's announcement at last of a big leading man part -- he's nabbed the lead in the upcoming Invisible Man movie opposite Elisabeth Moss for Saw screenwriter and Upgrade director Leigh Whannell. 

Universal's been on shaky footing with their reboot of their Universal Monsters movie universe -- that photo of Tom Cruise and Javier Bardem and Johnny Depp and Russell Crowe has become a joke at this point -- so they're pointedly going back to basics with this flick; they've teamed up with Jason Blum, king of the low-budget horror success story, to make a standalone series of films for not tons of cash. Anyway Whannell's Upgrade is so frakking good -- here's my review; I named it my 17th favorite movie of last year -- that we all should be excited about this. As if we weren't already with Elisabeth Moss attached...

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Oliver Jackson-Cohen Five Times

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Good grief, this man is so handsome he makes me want to stick my face straight into a lawnmower and call it a day. These shots are from the new issue of Flaunt, you can read the chat with him right here which is mostly about The Haunting of Hill House again. All of these magazine profiles keep happening (see also this) where they bring up the second season and he refuses to answer anything about it and come on, man. We all know you wouldn't be flirting with the subject in print if you didn't know shit. So basically what I am saying is... stop teasing and just ram it all the in, Olly! Ahem. Hit the jump for the rest of the photos...

Oliver Jackson-Cohen Fourteen Times

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I feel as if I must have missed this photo-shoot for Bello magazine of our boy Ollie from way back when The Haunting of Hill House hit Netflix what feels like twenty years ago, because the interview is all about that show, but no, it's the latest issue. Which led me to his IMDb page and, uh, he doesn't have any new projects announced? It seems like we're just starting to hear a lot of the actors from the first will be returning for the second season of Hill House though, even though its story is unconnected to the first -- it's called The Haunting of Bly Manor -- so let's hope for that! Otherwise some director snatch this beautiful man up before I do. Hit the jump for the rest of this shoot...

Good Morning World

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Oliver Jackson-Cohen, who's turning 32 today, is finally having himself a little moment with The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix - I'd argue he gives the best performance on the show as the addict twin Luke, perhaps tied with Victoria Pedretti as Nell. Anyway I went scanning back through our archives on him and he first caught our eye when he was up for the role of Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter in 2011 - can you picture that? I kind of can, but given the ghosting of Ben Walker in that movie's wake perhaps it's best that didn't happen. (Lesson: Never burn a Gummer, folks.) 

Anyway we've covered all there is to cover with him over the years, going back to his big role nearly right out of the gate as the sexy bad guy in a Dwayne Johnson movie, and up through his gay antics with James McArdle in Man in an Orange Shirt, so it's up to him now to help us help him. Keep the content coming, Oliver...

BHFF: The Clovehitch Killer

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Reporting from the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival this week!

Shakespeare's quote "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy," has been stuck in my head this week since it's repeated several times in the just-released (and very fine) Haunting of Hill House series on Netflix. It's a great quote for a Ghost Show to swipe - gives a sheen of serious historical and literate heft to the funny business of spooks and specters popping out of a series of ever smaller boxes. 

And there are moments in that show (or in something like Hereditary earlier this year) where the film-making's good enough that they manage to twist up this atheist's doubts (of which, yes, I have many) in sturdy emotional allegories - that is to say I stop caring that I don't believe in the afterlife and its movie monsters because what they're signifying with their horror story gets to the root of something true and scary about people, human people, you and me, and what's been done or what is in the process of being done to us every practical day to day.

So yes ghosts can be scary, as can satanic chants, to somebody that doesn't believe in a soul. That being said I tend to reserve my biggest and most lingering frights for the practical matters. The men in masks, those made of plastic or skin or what's under skin. The stuff that stuck in Hereditary, after all the crab-walking across the ceiling, was the sense of familial betrayal - of the should-be-unbreakable bonds being used to strangle instead. And that's where The Clovehitch Killer gets it right. And The Clovehitch Killer gets it very right.

Tyler (Charlie Plummer) is a boy scout. Literally. He's got the badges and the neckerchief to prove it. His Dad (Dylan McDermott, middle-aged out) is the Scout Leader, and together they make a do-gooder tag-team of serious un-hipness. Tyler goes to church, and he smiles sweetly, chastely, at the girl he likes across the aisle. Decency radiates off of him with a sheen some might mistake for acne cream - he is a good boy. So one night when he tempts fate and invites that nice girl to go driving with him, well, you'd be forgiven for being as surprised as she is when she digs a photo of a topless girl bound up with ropes out from under the front seat.

Tyler, you dirty dirty boy. The girl runs. The rumors spread. Only thing is, well, that's not Tyler's picture. That's not Tyler's car. Tyler borrowed Dad's car. Cue the unravelling. Before you know it he's hooked up with the bad girl (an atheist, gasp) from the bad side of town and, shades of Blue Velvet, they're investigating the small-town serial killer that gives the film its knotty title and before you know it Tyler ends up, as inevitably he must, back on his own front stoop, staring in.

If you think you can guess where the film's going from there you might not be wrong, per se - the horror lies not so much in the destination, but the journey, and I was shocked by how wrong The Clovehitch Killer was willing to make that journey seem and feel. Not "wrong" as in poorly made" by any stretch of the imagination - 'wrong" as in "fucked the fuck up." I sat in mid-day sunlight watching this movie growing steadily more unnerved - director Duncan Skiles and screenwriter Christopher Ford aren't afraid to really test the ropes, as it were; see how far they can stretch without breaking.

It doesn't break. The ropes hold. Dylan McDermott is committed like mad here - put this on his clip-reel for eternity; I'll never look at that big handsome lug the same way again. And Charlie Plummer, one of our finest young actors, strikes the mark yet again, making the sink of moral quicksand beneath Tyler's feet an unsteady and palpable dread - never has watching a boy become a man felt so diseased and sickly. The world is a corruption - we are the children of nightmares, made flesh from nowhere and nothing.

Michiel Huisman Five Times

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My great big work-load got chopped in half this weekend due to this cold that won't quit, and so I ended up marooned on my couch for more than I'd been anticipating -- not too shabby a fate when all ten episodes of Mike Flanagan's The Haunting of Hill House just dropped, it turned out. Did anybody else plow through it like me? 

As was clear from my breathless posts leading up to it I was looking forward to the series - Flanagan's time and again proven himself better than expectations - but I was still surprised by how scary and, surprisingly, moving, I ended up finding the show. I don't want to say too much since the series is only four days old at this point and I'm sure many of you need to catch up, but I will share this tweet...

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Awesome 🙏✌️

— Michiel Huisman (@Michiel_Huisman) October 13, 2018

... which uh yes got that response from Michiel Huisman himself. (Not to mention liked by both Oliver Jackson-Cohen and Carla Gugino, too.) Much humor was had in my household this weekend about me eloping with Michiel, believe you me. Anyway I posted some of this photo-shoot before but I think the rest of the shots got lost when our old Tumblr got deleted, so hit the jump for them, and if you have thoughts on the show hit the comments...

Just a Heads Up

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If you don't follow me on Twitter then, fortunate you, you haven't heard me whining all day that I'm sick - anyway I'm sick, hence the quiet today. If I can drug myself upright I should be around for some of the day tomorrow since the closing screening of NYFF (Julian Schnabel's Van Gogh bio-pic with Willem Dafoe called At Eternity's Gate) happens and I'd like to make that. But for now, none of that, just rest. Oh and The Haunting of Hill House drops on Netflix at Midnight tonight (hence this Oliver Jackson-Cohen picture here) so something else to look forward to, aka to keep me from dropping right dead like I feel like doing. Wheeeeee...
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The Huisman of Hill House

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I don't want to turn my few hours per day not inside NYFF screenings into 1) me talking about how busy I am with NYFF screenings and 2) a series of posts on trailers that've been released while I was in those screenings, but here we are and it's my second one of these today. Oh well. The least I can do as I catch up is also share that lovely photo of Michiel Huisman in a turtleneck and oh hey how about this gif of him in that Potato Peel Pie movie of his?

Jesus, this man is such a freak. I hate him. (I love him.) Anyway we're posting Huisman because we've got the trailer for the Haunting of Hill House series Netflix is premiering on October 12th to share, which has him opposite Carla Gugino and Oliver Jackson- Cohen and so forth, see our previous posts here. Watch:

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Pics of the Day

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Netflix has released the first batch of photos from their upcoming miniseries adaptation of Shirley Jackson's book The Haunting of Hill House - see the rest at EW. As we've covered extensively the series is from Gerald's Game director Mike Flanagan and it stars Michiel Huisman and Carla Gugino...

... and Oliver Jackson Cohen and yadda yadda other people yadda. That threesome is plenty for us! Anyway Netflix also announced that the show will drop in forty-six days, better known as October 12th, just in time for the spooky seasonal greetings of All Hallows. Boo!

Shirley Wins The Lottery

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Some days I don't know how to weigh the awful things in the world with all the good stuff that is usually frivolous but in better times would seem enough - plenty even! So yeah our government is rotting from the head down right now, but on the other hand Elisabeth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg (sidenote: can you even with that picture up top?) have just signed on to play Shirley Jackson (yes the Shirley Jackson that wrote "The Lottery" and The Haunting of Hill House, among others) and her husband in a fictional story based on a book of which I was unaware.

The 2014 book by Susan Scarf Merrell is called Shirley and it tells the story of a young couple that moves in with Jackson and her husband only to " find themselves fodder for a psycho-drama that inspires Jackson’s next major novel." So it sounds like there's nice roles but two more actors here but man alive Elisabeth Moss & Michael Stuhlbarg are you kidding me? Two of the finest around right now...
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There really might not be a better actress working today than Elisabeth Moss pic.twitter.com/AVwz3K5pTV

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) May 3, 2018

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This is a lot for me to take in. The book was adapted by Sarah Gubbins who created and wrote the show I Love Dick (of which I was a fan save the casting of Kevin Bacon, whose appeal always escapes me) and it will be directed by Josephine Decker, whose film Madeline's Madeline has not come out yet but which got some raves out of festival screenings. Also nice to see: these are all women working on this! Shirley Jackson is a figure screaming for feminist dissection so bring it on. And she's hot right now with Netflix currently prepping their long-form adaption of Hill House that we're salivating over...
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Pic of the Day

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The amazing @ojacksoncohen 🙌👏👌in between takes on set of The Haunting of Hill House

A post shared by Michiel Huisman (@michielhuisman) on May 7, 2018 at 10:55am PDT

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Having been nearly a year since it was announced I keep forgetting that Netflix is currently in the process of shooting a series based on Shirley Jackson's horror classic The Haunting of Hill House that stars two MNPP-faves in Michiel Huisman and Oliver Jackson-Cohen. The former posted this picture of the latter on set just a wee bit ago on his Instagram - PS Michiel's posted several very pleasant shots of himself (as if there's any other kind) over the past couple of weeks so you should probably be keeping an eye on that...

In related news I re-watched Karyn Kusama's 2015 horror film The Invitation last night and holy hell does it hold up. I'd worried that knowing where things were going would tamper my appreciation of the movie, since so much of watching it the first time (here's my review from way back when) is about not being sure where it's going, if it's heading where you think it might be heading, but that is not the case I am happy to report.

Foreknowledge of the outcome actually somehow makes re-watching the film even more upsetting; seeing all the signs present themselves and the characters willfully ignoring or avoiding them out of a misplaced sense of social responsibility makes everything even more sickening... and I mean 'sickening" as high praise, obviously. If you've somehow managed to miss this movie until now I really recommend firing it up. It's streaming on Netflix! Easy peasy.

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THE INVITATION is barely three years old and it should already be considered a stone cold classic, one of the greatest horror films of our time - both a blood red shriek of grief and a black comedy about meeting your new boyfriend's ex pic.twitter.com/cjgUVIMmkj

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) May 7, 2018

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Kusama's next film Destroyer with Nicole Kidman and 

Sebastian Stan really can't get here soon enough for me.

Look at these pics of Seb & Nic on the set! (via)

Good Morning, World

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Let us all come together to wish Oliver Jackson-Cohen a very happy 31st birthday today! Oliver was last seen being oh so dashing and gay, oh so gay, opposite James McArdle in the WWII half of Man in an Orange Shirt, the BBC's recent homosexual miniseries that also starred Julian Morris and some lady named Vanessa Redgrave. We covered it quite a bit, click through here for that.

Next up for Olly, and I somehow crazily missed this fantastic news, is Netflix's mini-series version of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House - when we last heard the series was going to star Michiel Huisman, which was exciting enough. But there's been a lot more casting since then - the ten-hour series will also star Oliver here, not to mention Carla Gugino, Henry Thomas, and Timothy Hutton. The series will reunite two of those folks - Gugino and Thomas - with their Gerald's Game director Mike Flanagan, who is running the thing. (And that's a creepy reunion between actors if you've watched Gerald's Game by now, which I sure hope you have.)

Anyway back to the Birthday Boy Oliver - I love how gratuitous that shot there is of Oliver buttoning up his trousers, don't you? I throw the word "gratuitous" around a lot but that is truly, lovingly gratuitous. props to the folks who made the shitty Dracula series a couple of years ago, which is what this is from. Anyway click through our Oliver archives for lots more!

The Haunting of Michiel Huisman

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I love the thought of hirsute Dutch beauty Michiel Huisman being our latest Scream Queen, don't you? Last year the Game of Thrones hunk starred in Karyn Kusama's fantabulous film The Invitation (which gave me many a tossing turning night) and his chest co-starred opposite Blake Lively (which is its own sort of nightmare) and now he's signed up to lead the cast of the new House on Haunted Hill adaptation that Netflix is putting on. 

We already told you about this project back in April when it was announced but let us now recap -- Shirley Jackson's classic book (about a group of psychically sensitive folks camping out in a thought haunted manse) is being turned into a ten-hour series for the streamer by director Mike Flanagan. Flanagan previously made the Ouija sequel, which was totally shockingly decent, and before this series is out he'll have released his film version of Stephen King's marvelously scary book Gerald's Game with the ace perfect casting of Carla Gugino in its lead.

Michiel is the first cast-member that's been announced - I believe he's playing the role that Russ Tamblyn played in the great 1963 film and that Owen Wilson played in the 1999 abortion, although they've changed the character's name. (I mean just look at the color schemes in those two pictures above to judge which movie worked and which one didn't.) The character is the remaining heir of the house who is behind bringing everybody in to see just how haunted it is. And I guess we'll have to wait and see if they knock his head off in the fireplace this time or not...