One room, one door, and nowhere to run. Gary Dauberman's production company Coin Operated has picked up the rights to Rest Stop, the new horror novella from author Nat Cassidy, and Cassidy himself is writing the script for the feature adaptation. Cassidy's own logline for the thing is the kind that sells itself: "Green Room meets Gerald's Game."
The Setup: A Musician, a Bathroom, and Two Kinds of Hell
Rest Stop drops a young musician into a gas-station bathroom in the dead of night, then locks the door from the outside. An unseen assailant has him trapped, caught between whatever is waiting on the other side of that door and the horrors skittering down the walls inside the room with him. It's a single-location pressure cooker, the kind of confined-space setup that lives or dies on tension and has nowhere to hide a weak moment. Cassidy has called it the closest thing he's written to extreme horror, so this one is built to leave a mark.
Dauberman's Track Record
If you want a name attached to confined, mean-spirited horror, Dauberman is a strong pick. He wrote It and It Chapter Two, built out the Annabelle and The Nun corners of the Conjuring universe, and stepped behind the camera to direct Annabelle Comes Home. His Coin Operated banner, run with president Mia Maniscalco, recently produced the video-game adaptation Until Dawn. Dauberman and Maniscalco are set to produce Rest Stop together, putting franchise muscle behind a tight, contained story.
From the Page to the Screen
The novella landed as part of Cassidy's collection I Know A Place: Rest Stop and Other Dark Detours, released through Shortwave Publishing and Simon & Schuster on May 5. Cassidy is no stranger to readers who chase the good stuff. He's the author of Mary and Nestlings, and having him adapt his own book keeps the voice in the room instead of handing it off to someone who has to reverse-engineer the dread.
What We're Watching For
The project is in development, so there's no cast, director, or release date yet. But the bones are good: a nasty, claustrophobic premise, the original author on script duty, and a producer who knows how to turn horror into something that connects with a wide crowd. Single-location horror done right is some of the most efficient terror going, and Rest Stop has the right people lined up to pull it off. We'll be tracking it.