Whalefall: Daniel Kraus’ “swallowed by a whale” thriller novel gets film deal

Daniel Kraus has worked with Guillermo del Toro on the novel Trollhunters, which inspired the Netflix animated series, and the novelization of The Shape of Water. When George A. Romero left behind an unfinished novel called The Living Dead, Kraus was the writer chosen to finish it. He has contributed a couple stories to the Shudder series Creepshow, a TV expansion of the Creepshow film Romero made with Stephen King. Now Deadline reports that Imagine Entertainment has picked up the film rights to Kraus’s novel Whalefall, which won’t even be on store shelves until August 8th. (You can pre-order a copy at THIS LINK.)

Since the writers guild is currently on strike (along with the Screen Actors Guild), Deadline notes that “the idea here is, of course, to develop Whalefall for the big screen, at the point when Hollywood is again back up and running. No development will be done and no writing services will be rendered here until new guild contracts are struck.”

Whalefall is a survival thriller that’s described as “The Martian meets 127 Hours“. The short description is that it’s a “scientifically accurate thriller about a scuba diver who’s been swallowed by an eighty-foot, sixty-ton sperm whale and has only one hour to escape before his oxygen runs out.” Here’s the longer version:

Jay Gardiner has given himself a fool’s errand – to find the remains of his deceased father in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Monastery Beach. He knows it’s a long shot, but Jay feels it’s the only way for him to lift the weight of guilt he has carried since his dad’s death by suicide the previous year. The dive begins well enough, but the sudden appearance of a giant squid puts Jay in very real jeopardy, made infinitely worse by the arrival of a sperm whale looking to feed. Suddenly, Jay is caught in the squid’s tentacles and drawn into the whale’s mouth where he is pulled into the first of its four stomachs. He quickly realizes he has only one hour before his oxygen tanks run out – one hour to defeat his demons and escape the belly of a whale. Suspenseful and cinematic, Whalefall is an “astoundingly great” (Gillian Flynn, New York Times bestselling author) thriller about a young man who has given up on life… only to find a reason to live in the most dangerous and unlikely of places.

So we’re looking at a scientific take on the Jonah story, which sounds like a good time to me.

Does Whalefall sound interesting to you? Let us know by leaving a comment below.