Acclaimed writer-director David Lowery is teaming with fellow filmmaker Alex Ross Perry to write the screenplay for the film, while both Gary Dauberman and Michael Bay are on board as producers. Notably, when released in 2016, The Fisherman was a sizable success, both commercially and critically, with Langan’s book even going on to win the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel that year.
If you’re unfamiliar with David Lowery, you shouldn’t be. Over the course of the past decade-plus, he has emerged as one of the most exciting and distinctly personal authorial voices in all of modern genre cinema. Though he worked as an independent filmmaker for years prior, his first big breakthrough was with the 2013 film, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, which earned rave reviews. Since then, he has alternated between larger studio-backed commercial projects (Pete’s Dragon, The Old Man & the Gun, Peter Pan & Wendy) and more niche genre fare (A Ghost Story, The Green Knight, and the recent and absolutely masterful Mother Mary).
While the filmmaker has long dabbled in horror-adjacent material, he has never made a full-on horror film before, which makes his tackling of The Fisherman all the more notable. A Ghost Story is predominantly an existential and highly experiential work, but it does feature a couple of completely effective scares that hit all the harder because of Lowery’s exacting pace in the edit.
Mother Mary has some great ethereal horror to it and even delightfully builds its entire story around a central possession setpiece, but even Lowery himself has been hesitant to call it a horror film. Even The Green Knight has beats that play out like what would happen if you chucked Andrei Tarkovsky and John Carpenter into a blender.
It’s clear that Lowery has a real affinity for the genre and routinely works elements of it into his other films. Beyond that, he also has a real gift for adaptation, making him an ideal fit for this project. Many of his films (including Pete’s Dragon, The Green Knight, and Peter Pan & Wendy) have seen him working as both a writer and director, adapting highly revered source material in intricate, articulate, and fascinating ways. Here, his collaboration with fellow independent filmmaker Alex Ross Perry is all the more notable.
What makes this all even more intriguing is the unique and seemingly diametrically opposed combination of these filmmakers with their producers. Gary Dauberman has had a hand in many of the most commercially successful horror films of the past decade, from Annabelle to It and beyond. Meanwhile, Michael Bay is well known for his extravagant, huge-budget spectacles.
Even in the horror realm as a producer, Bay’s Platinum Dunes is generally associated with glossy, big-budget projects such as the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street remakes of the ‘00s. Bringing these extremely commercially-minded producers together with the far more artistically-minded duo of Lowery and Perry is a fascinating move, and one that seems to promise an entirely unique cinematic experience when The Fisherman releases.
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