Scott Derrickson is set to direct an adaptation of the Christopher Golden horror novel Road of Bones for Screen Gems

Director Scott Derrickson, whose credits include Sinister and Doctor Strange, recently got the sci-fi horror film The Gorge out into the world, and he’s currently pushing The Black Phone 2 toward its October 17 release date. Now, The Hollywood Reporter has revealed that he has already lined up his next genre project, as he has signed on to direct the supernatural thriller Road of Bones, based on a novel by best-selling author Christopher Golden, for Sony Pictures’ Screen Gems label.

Derrickson will also be writing the screenplay with his frequent collaborator C. Robert Cargill. The story is set in Siberia along the Kolyma Highway, a real highway that was built in Stalinist Soviet Union using the labor of prisoners from the region’s gulags. Lore has it that hundreds of thousands of inmates perished during the construction of the 2000 km road and due to the permafrost, it was judged easier to just build atop of the bodies. Golden’s book is described as a mix of folk and survival horror. It tells of an American documentarian who, intrigued by the road’s history, ends up fighting for his life in one of the coldest and most remote places on Earth. St. Martin’s Press published the novel in 2022.

Here’s the full description of Golden’s Road of Bones: Surrounded by barren trees in a snow-covered wilderness with a dim, dusky sky forever overhead, Siberia’s Kolyma Highway is 1200 miles of gravel packed permafrost within driving distance of the Arctic Circle. A narrow path where drivers face such challenging conditions as icy surfaces, limited visibility, and an average temperature of sixty degrees below zero, fatal car accidents are common.But motorists are not the only victims of the highway. Known as the Road of Bones, it is a massive graveyard for the former Soviet Union’s gulag prisoners. Hundreds of thousands of people worked to death and left where their bodies fell, consumed by the frozen elements and plowed beneath the permafrost road.

Fascinated by the history, documentary producer Felix “Teig” Teigland is in Russia to drive the highway, envisioning a new series capturing Life and Death on the Road of Bones with a ride to the town of Akhust, “the coldest place on Earth”, collecting ghost stories and local legends along the way. Only, when Teig and his team reach their destination, they find an abandoned town, save one catatonic nine-year-old girl―and a pack of predatory wolves, faster and smarter than any wild animals should be. Pursued by the otherworldly beasts, Teig’s companions confront even more uncanny and inexplicable phenomena along the Road of Bones, as if the ghosts of Stalin’s victims were haunting them. It is a harrowing journey that will push Teig beyond endurance and force him to confront the sins of his past.

Derrickson and Cargill will produce the film through their Crooked Highway production banner, which has a first-look deal with Screen Gems. Golden serves as an executive producer alongside Vince Cheng and Pete Donaldson.

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