Directors sign for Stephen King’s Suffer the Little Children and Rose Madder

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Stephen King

The Stephen King project THE DARK TOWER didn't exactly do gangbuster business at the box office, but after the monster opening weekend of the King adaptation IT (which made way more money in one weekend than THE DARK TOWER has made in over five weeks), we should probably prepare to hear a whole lot of King-related movie announcements.

Here are two such announcements right now: production company Bread & Circuses Entertainment has revealed the names of the directors who will be taking the helm of their adaptations of the King short story SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN and his novel ROSE MADDER.

SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN will be directed by Sean Carter, who made his feature directorial debut with the Bella Thorne / Chandler Riggs slasher KEEP WATCHING. Formerly known as HOME INVASION, that film has been waiting a few years for a distributor to release it.

SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN is 

a supernatural thriller that centers on a recently divorced first-grade schoolteacher who notices some “unsettling” traits in the children in her class: flashes of a bizarre texture lurking underneath their skin and a chilling, conspiratorial secrecy to the way they play together. And now, people in her new town are dying mysteriously. Is this all just paranoia, or is something more disturbing happening to the children in this town? This story was published as part of a collection of short stories in King’s Nightmares & Dreamscapes.

Carter had this to say about the adaptation: 

The Stephen King aesthetic has been imprinted into my psyche since I was a teenager, and Suffer the Little Children fits right into that classic King paradigm: a tragically flawed lead character put into a shockingly unimaginable scenario. It’s a tiny peek into a mythology that I can’t wait to expand into a full-length movie.”

For the ROSE MADDER adaptation, Bread & Circuses has hired director Assaf Bernstein, who directed the television series Fauda, which can be seen on Netflix, and recently completed work on a psychological thriller called LOOK AWAY (formerly known as BEHIND THE GLASS).

A description of ROSE MADDER: 

After 14 years of being beaten, Rose Daniels wakes up one morning and leaves her husband — but she keeps looking over her shoulder, because Norman has the instincts of a predator. And what is the strange work of art that has Rose in a kind of spell?

There is no schedule or casting information available for either of these projects yet, but you can be sure that we will be watching them closely as they progress.

Source: Deadline

About the Author

Cody is a news editor and film critic, focused on the horror arm of JoBlo.com, and writes scripts for videos that are released through the JoBlo Originals and JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channels. In his spare time, he's a globe-trotting digital nomad, runs a personal blog called Life Between Frames, and writes novels and screenplays.