Reddit Short Story Getting Film Adaptation

Reddit’s popular short story Purgatory Games is on the docket to receive its own film, reports Deadline.

Revealed ahead of the weekend, Sam Haysom’s 2020 short story has been optioned for a film. Originally published on the NoSleep subreddit, the story proper concerns a narrator who receives a USB drive that has footage of six people trapped in an underground bunker. To get out, those captives have to comply with the individual rules their kidnapper laid out for them, or get killed. When he released the first episode for Purgatory, Haysom likened it to the 1992 movie Cube, and 2001’s The Hole. More recent peers may be the Saw franchise, or maybe even Squid Game.

Production company Lyrical Media will be bringing the film to life, with writer Bryan Edward Hill on current script duties. Hill, who will also executive produce the film, has previously written for comics and TV such as Titans and Batman & the Outsiders. More recently, he’s sold a spinoff for Red Hood (played by Curran Walters over on Titans) to HBO Max, and is penning a film adaptation of Image Comics’ Bitter Root.

Purgatory Games is another Reddit tale to jump over to film in recent months. As Deadline notes, other short stories from the popular social media site have gotten the movie option, including The Occupant from Barbarian director Zach Cregger and Netflix’s upcoming movie I am Not Alone starring Jessica Chastain. The trend of popular internet horror stories getting ported over to goes even further back, with creepypastas like Slender Man and the Midnight Game getting their own theatrical adaptations.

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