Paul W.S. Anderson is going back into deep space, which last time involved a ship that came back from hell, a lot of Latin and Sam Neill looking very unwell. Deadline reports that he will direct film adaptations of Nether Station and Nether Vortex, Kevin J. Anderson’s cosmic horror novels. The two Andersons are not related, although the credits are going to look like a family firm.
The neatest detail is that the books owe a debt to the director. Kevin J. Anderson has named Event Horizon as a direct influence. “I tried to put all my fears and paranoia into Nether Station,” he said, adding that he couldn’t think of a better director for it. So a 1997 film that sank at the box office and then crawled back as a cult classic inspired a novel, and that novel has now led back to its director. It’s the most Lovecraftian career loop imaginable: something old and patient, waiting in the dark to be summoned again.
Nether Station came out in 2024 from Blackstone Publishing’s Weird Tales Presents imprint. A wormhole called Nether sits at the edge of the solar system, and a billionaire’s expedition goes to exploit it. The lead is astrophysicist Cammie Skoura, a brilliant, neurodivergent young scientist, and the crew soon find ruins of long-dead alien civilisations and some very good reasons why they died out. There’s a nice nod to H.P. himself when the lab rats get loose and end up in the walls. The sequel, Nether Vortex, came out on 27 October and picks things up five years later, with the station’s crew missing and Earth ignoring their final warnings, as Earth in these stories always does.
Jonathan Wakeham is writing both screenplays. Paul W.S. Anderson will produce with Jeremy Bolt, his partner since Event Horizon and Death Race, and with Weird Tales president John Harlacher and Tony Eldridge, the magazine’s VP of film. It’s quite something to see the title that first printed Lovecraft in the 1920s now running a film department, but if anyone has earned a cut of cosmic horror cinema, it’s Weird Tales. The director, a long-time fan of the author, says that calling the books cinematic “is an understatement”, which suggests nobody will need to hold back on the tentacles.
Kevin J. Anderson is best known for Star Wars and Dune; he co-produced Dune: Part Two and Dune: Prophecy. Paul W.S. Anderson spent much of the last two decades on six Resident Evil films and Monster Hunter, so a return to proper space horror is overdue. No cast, production start or release date has been announced. Some reviewers found the first novel more haunted-house-in-space than truly bleak, and that’s no bad thing in a director’s hands. Event Horizon was a haunted house in space too, and people are still arguing about its missing footage nearly thirty years on.
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