He raised your hackles with 2009’s Dogtooth and had you caught in the headlights with 2017’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Now Yorgos Lanthimos is potentially tackling the creature under the house with a film based on Richard Brautigan’s The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Lanthimos is currently in negotiations to direct the adaptation of the book, which follows two hired guns who travel to Oregon in 1902 to help destroy a “monster” reportedly living in a system of ice caves under the home of a woman named Miss Hawkline. Of course, when they arrive, things are not always what they seem, unless we’re talking about this film seemingly like it could use a little Rachel Weisz, which it absolutely could.
The Oscar-nominated director of The Favorite isn’t the first to attempt an adaptation of Brautigan’s 1974 novel. Harold and Maude’s Hal Ashby spent years on the project, with Harry Dean Stanton and Jeff Bridges floated to star, but the project fell apart after the director rejected Brautigan’s screenplay and the author declined to write another draft. After Ashby passed away in 1988, Tim Burton attempted an adaptation, at one point starring Clint Eastwood and Jack Nicholson, with similar results. Of course, neither of them had Rachel Weisz playing the monster (just throwing that suggestion out there!) so Yorgos is already set up for success.
