Warner Bros Working On Dante’s Inferno Movie

A lot of horror fans have long since grown exhausted with the studios constantly rehashing all the old favourite genre properties in recent years - but what about this?

Classic horror stories don’t come much older than Dante’s ‘Inferno’ - and now, we may have a new take on that legendary descent into hell coming to the big screen.

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Deadline report that up-and-coming screenwriter Dwain Worrell has sold an original ‘Dante’s Inferno’ script to Warner Bros, who are said to be “excited by its scale and franchise potential.”

Reportedly centred on “the epic love story that is at the core of Dante’s Inferno,” it sees the hero “[descend] through the nine circles of hell to save the woman he loves.”

‘Inferno’ is the first and perhaps best-known section of Dante Alighieri’s epic poem ‘The Divine Comedy,’ written between 1308 and 1321, a work deeply rooted in Christian theology, and arguably the key source for a lot of the popular notions about Heaven and Hell.

It has inspired countless works over the centuries, and has been filmed several times including a 1924 silent version from Fox which, surprisingly for the time, featured scenes of full frontal nudity.

Fox remade ‘Dante’s Inferno’ in 1935 with Spencer Tracy in the lead. Later, Ken Russell filmed his own ‘Dante’s Inferno’ for the BBC with Oliver Reed in 1967, although this was primarily a biopic of Dante himself.

Clearly enamoured with the material, Russell would go on to use footage from the 1924 film in his later movie ‘Altered States.’

Perhaps most famously, ‘Dante’s Inferno’ inspired the gruesome 2010 video game from EA Games. A movie adaptation of this has been touted, with ‘Evil Dead’ remake director Fede Alvarez linked.

As it’s still very early days for this new take on ‘Dante’s Inferno,’ there’s no indication yet as to when it might hit cinemas or who might be in line to direct.

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Picture Credit: 20th Century Fox, EA Games