After Emilia Pérez, Jacques Audiard will direct a horror film
The French director dares a new register and adapts La Nuit ravageée for Netflix, a horror novel by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo hailed as a tribute to Stephen King.
Two years after the enormous success ofEmilia Péreznominated for an Oscar for best film and crowned a César winner, Jacques Audiard has already found his next project.
According to Variety, the French director will direct The Ravaged Nightan adaptation of the novel by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo published last year by Gallimard.
This will be a great first for Audiard, who had never before explored horror cinema.
The story takes place in the early 1990s in Saint-Auch, a fictional suburb of Toulouse. After the mysterious death of one of their friends, a group of teenagers decide to explore an abandoned house which exerts a strange fascination on them. But the building shelters a supernatural presence capable of feeding on their fears, their traumas and their deepest desires, transforming their psychological flaws into real nightmares.
Upon its release, the novel received widespread critical acclaim for its blend of fantasy horror and social realism. Often compared to the works of Stephen King, The Ravaged Night also addresses themes such as racism, homophobia, domestic violence and even adolescent anxieties.
The author, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, is already well known in cinema: his novel The Animal Kingdom had been adapted by Thomas Cailley in 2023. Presented at the Cannes Film Festival, the film then won five Césars.
A turn towards the fantastic therefore, for Jacques Audiard, but which remains consistent with his career. Of A prophet has Of rust and bonepassing through Dheepan Or Emilia Pérezthe filmmaker has always been interested in marginal characters confronted with worlds of great brutality. Variety also believes that it will not be a simple genre film, but a work where horror will be used, as in the novel, to explore social and psychological questions.
The film will be produced in French. No filming or broadcast date has yet been announced.
The Ravaged Night will be a Netflix film, produced by the platform and broadcast online around the world. One unknown remains: its release in France. Variety suggests that, since it is a Netflix original production, the film could not be shown in theaters here and arrive directly in streaming, which would be a first for Audiard.
