Stephen King's The Dark Half to get screen adaptation; film will be directed Her Smell helmer Alex Ross Perry

Stephen King's 1989 bestseller The Dark Half is all set to be adapted for the screen by MGM. The movie will be steered by Alex Ross Perry, whose directorial Her Smell won positive reviews upon its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2018, according to a report published by Deadline.

Alex Ross Perry will direct the film adaptation The Dark Half (inset). Image from Twitter

The Dark Half was adapted in 1993 by the "father of the zombie film genre" George A Romero, and starred Timothy Hutton as Thad Beaumont, a writer who also sells grisly crime novels under the pseudonym George Stark. Trouble begins when Stark's novels start doing better than Beaumont's novels. When the author and his wife decide to give the alter ego a burial, he emerges from his grave as a physical entity, and goes on a murderous spree. The movie fared poorly at the box office, grossing $10 million from a $15 million budget, reports Variety.

King wrote this novel after his secret identity, Richard Bachman, was outed. After his secret identity was unveiled, King first released the collection of stories in 1985 under the title The Bachman Books, where he explained why he had created the alter ego in the first place. In a subsequent press release, it was announced Bachman had died in 1985 of “cancer of the pseudonym.” King's novels as Bachman were far more sinister and cynical in nature.

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In recent years, King's works have been mined time and again to create movies and TV shows. It: Chapter Two, the sequel to 2017 horror flick It, released on 6 September. Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer's directorial Pet Sematary has been adapted from King's 1983 bestselling novel of the same name. Apart from these, his novels The Long Walk, Doctor Sleep, In the Tall Grass, and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon have also witnessed screen adaptations.

(Read: Pet Sematary: A look at the 10 best Stephen King film adaptations, from The Shining to It)