Horror pic The Bringing came to our attention when Drive auteur Nicolas Winding Refn entered talks to helm the project, which was rumored to have been inspired by the bizarre death of a woman at the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, what appeared to be a highly promising chiller took a major hit when Refn departed after negotiations reportedly stalled. Now, the studio is pushing ahead with The Bringing, as Deadline reports that Jeremy Lovering is in talks to direct.
Though certainly a less familiar name than Refn, Lovering cut his teeth on the very well-received psychological horror thriller In Fear. He also helmed the first episode of Sherlock‘s third season, titled “The Empty Hearse.” Though In Fear is still on my list of films to see, “The Empty Hearse” was a terrific and fast-paced installment of the BBC series. Sony Pictures evidently saw something it liked in the director, and hopefully now that he’s in negotiations for the gig, the project can move ahead without any further hiccups.
Brandon and Philip Murphy penned the script, based on a bizarre real-life case involving Elisa Lam, a Canadian woman who somehow traveled to Los Angeles and wound up dead in a water tank on the roof of the downtown Cecil Hotel (a bizarre video of her behavior in a hotel elevator made the case an Internet phenomenon). Instead of focusing on the Lam case, The Bringing centers on “a man investigating a death at the hotel, and the nightmare he stumbles into.”
No cast has yet been announced for The Bringing, but that should come soon now that the project is back on track. In the meantime, however, you can watch the unnerving elevator security tape of Lam’s inexplicable behavior before her death so as to get a better idea of why Sony Pictures is so keen to build the incident into a horror flick:
