Searchlight Pictures has set Jonathan Levine (Warm Bodies, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane) to direct an adaptation of Grady Hendrix’s 2014 horror-comedy novel Horrorstör. Levine has penned the most recent draft of the screenplay for Searchlight, working from an earlier script by Hendrix.
Published by Quirk Books, Horrorstör takes place inside the Orsk furniture superstore in Cleveland, where employees investigating a string of unexplained vandalism during an overnight shift uncover a supernatural force connected to the building’s past. The novel was released packaged like a big-box furniture catalog, complete with illustrated product listings that grow progressively darker as the story unfolds, allowing the design itself to become part of the horror experience.
To date, the book has been translated into 14 languages: Chinese, Czech, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Korean, Norwegian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.
The project comes to Searchlight from New Republic Pictures, which landed the film rights in 2020 following an effort by The Jackal Group to develop the book for television at Fox Broadcasting Company. Brian Oliver will produce for New Republic, alongside Gillian Bohrer for Megamix, Adam Goldworm for Aperture Entertainment, and Brad Fischer. Hendrix will exec produce alongside Quirk Books. Richard Ruiz, VP of Production, and Apolline Berty, Production Executive, are overseeing the project for Searchlight, reporting to Heads of Production and Development DanTram Nguyen and Katie Goodson-Thomas.
Besides Horrorstör, Hendrix has released multiple genre and horror hit novels, including We Sold Our Souls, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, The Final Girl Support Group, and How to Sell a Haunted House. My Best Friend’s Exorcism was adapted into a feature film released in 2022 by Amazon Studios, while The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires and The Final Girl Support Group are slated for television adaptations. Hendrix also co-wrote the 2017 feature Mohawk with Ted Geoghegan and wrote the spec script for the horror-comedy Satanic Panic, which was acquired and produced by Fangoria in 2018. His latest novel, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, debuted in 2026 at No. 2 on The New York Times Best Seller list, No. 5 on the USA Today Best-Selling Books list, and No. 2 on the Indie Bestsellers list. It is also a nominee for the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel, alongside Joe Hill’s King Sorrow, Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s The Bewitching, and Wendy N. Wagner’s Girl in the Creek.
