Stephen King’s Cujo Gets an Unexpected Yet Exciting Director

Cujo is chomping his way back to the movies and his new owner is someone very good at terrifying you. Darren Aronofsky, the director of Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, Black Swan, mother!, and The Whale is in talks with Netflix to direct a new adaptation of the Stephen King classic about a killer dog.

If this is the first you’re hearing about the film, that makes a lot of sense. It was only last week news broke that Netflix was working on a new version of the story, but at the time there were no names attached. No director, no writer, no star. Which certainly seemed odd because, how the heck does that work? But, if Aronofsky is on board, it makes a lot more sense. He’s got a great track record across genres and is sure to get all kinds of awesome people interested. The InSneider first broke the news of his involvement, which was then corroborated by multiple trade publications.

Originally published in 1981, King’s book is about a dog who contracts rabies after being bitten by a bat and then goes on a rampant killing spree. Two years later, it was adapted into a hit film starring E.T.’s Dee Wallace but that was that. However, Netflix’s Roy Lee has found lots of success producing King’s stories, such as both installments of It, and brought this new adaptation to light at the streamer.

There’s no writer yet which, again, seems odd—how do you have a director without a writer?—but Aronofsky is not a filmmaker known for compromise. From his earliest days willing a gritty thriller like Pi into existence, all the way through his Oscar-winning fare with Natalie Portman and Brendan Fraser, Aronofsky’s work has always been visceral. It’s intense. It’s emotional. It’s often incredibly messed up. And if you think of all those things wrapped in the frame of a Stephen King story about a killer dog, well, it sounds like a winning combination.

Of course, there’s no guarantee the project with Aronofsky will come to light. He’s currently finishing a crime film called Caught Stealing which will be out this summer. But we hope he does return to the world of intense horrors that made him famous in the first place.

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