'Happy Death Day's Christopher Landon Will Direct A New Horror Film For Blumhouse

The Happy Death Day franchise is dead unless a service like Netflix comes along to fund a third entry, but that's not going to keep director Christopher Landon down. The filmmaker, who directed the first Happy Death Day and both wrote and directed its sequel, is now developing a new horror movie to direct at Blumhouse, the low budget/high control production company where he's worked extensively over the past decade. Here's what we know about his mysterious new project.

Discussing Film broke the news that Landon was working on a new movie for Blumhouse, and Bloody-Disgusting confirmed that initial report. Discussing Film describes the project like this: "Plot details are vague but sources say that it will focus on a killer who wreaks havoc in a small town." Vague, indeed – that's such a simple premise that it could be a back-to-basics, Halloween-style slasher film, or it could be hiding another high concept, like Happy Death Day's Groundhog Day-esque approach to its storytelling.

Landon wrote the 2007 movie Disturbia, the enjoyable Rear Window riff starring Shia LaBeouf, and he made his feature directorial debut a few years later with a little-talked-about indie movie called Burning Palms, an obnoxiously provocative film I found to be utterly despicable in every way. But after that, he became one of the key voices behind Blumhouse's mega-successful Paranormal Activity franchise, writing the second, third, and fourth movies before writing and directing Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones. Credit where it's due: those early Paranormal movies are a lot of fun, largely thanks to the way Landon crafted their interconnected mythologies and expanded on what could have been a one-and-done concept.

Landon then wrote and directed the forgettable Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse, wrote the Emma Roberts/Dave Franco social media thriller Viral (which reunited him with Paranormal Activity 3 & 4 directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman), and finally graduated to a beloved franchise of his own with the Happy Death Day movies. If he's able to bring the same sense of freshness to whatever this mysterious new horror project is, we'll be thrilled – and if he can either find a main role for Happy Death Day star Jessica Rothe or give some other up-and-comer an opportunity to make just as much of a splash as she did in those films, we'll be even more thrilled.