Someone warn Elon Musk, because Mike Flanagan has some terrible news about the Red Planet. According to Deadline, the Haunting of Hill House creator will direct a film adaptation of Christopher Pike’s space-horror novel The Season of Passage for Universal; he’ll also write the screenplay for the movie alongside his brother, James Flanagan. Meanwhile, the Doctor Sleep director is already working on a previously announced television adaptation of Pike’s 1994 book The Midnight Club for Netflix, among approximately 5,000 other projects.
The Season of Passage, one of Pike’s few non-YA novels, reportedly follows “celebrity Dr. Lauren Wagner, who was involved in a manned expedition to Mars. The whole world admired and respected her. But Lauren knew fear. Inside ― voices entreating her to love them. Outside ― the mystery of the missing group that had gone before her. The dead group. But were they simply dead? Or something else?†See, we’re all so obsessed with finding life on Mars that no one is considering the alternative. The alternative being … ghosts? Monsters? Demonic Martians? We don’t know, but we’re excited to touch down at some point in the future and find out.