By Travis Johnson

It’s a good time to be a Spierig Brother. Not only are the Australian horror specialists on board to revitalise the Saw franchise, but it’s just been announced that CBS films has picked up the US distro rights to their upcoming thriller, Winchester.

The film centres on the famed Winchester Mystery House which, ICYMI, is touted as the most haunted place in North America. The official synopsis explains:

Winchester tells the strange and dramatic tale of Sarah Winchester, who was heir to the Winchester firearms fortune. Her husband and child died suddenly, and Sarah came to believe she had been cursed by the lethal legacy of the “gun that won the west” and all of those who ended up on the wrong end of the gun barrel. She consulted a medium, who sent her to San Jose in 1884 to begin a massive construction process that took 38 years and resulted in a 24,000-square-foot, 160-room Gothic mansion.”

The house is reportedly haunted by all those who fell victim to Winchester rifles over the course of American westward expansion; given that the Winchester ’73 was touted as “The Gun That Won The West”, that’s an awful lot of people. It’s meaty, spooky stuff, and a good writer could wring all kinds of subtext about race and colonialism out of such grist, as Alan Moore did when he used it for the basis of “Ghost Dance” in Swamp Thing #45. Plus, the film was developed by Imagination Design Works, who won the rights to the actual house in San Jose, California, and the Spierigs will be allowed to shoot there, which is a first.

Winchester is expected to go into production in March, 2017.

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