Blake Lively’s next big project after It Ends With Us is a sapphic horror movie
Blake Lively is set to star in another book to film adaptation, and this time it’s a queer horror. (Penguin/Getty/Canva)
Blake Lively is in her adaptation era. Following the controversy-ridden press campaign for the film version of Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us, one of the star’s next big projects is a Netflix version of Marcus Kliewer’s queer horror novella, We Used To Live Here.
Despite We Used To Live Here only coming out on hardback in June this year, streaming giant Netflix reportedly secured the rights to adapt it for screen way back in 2021, with Blake Lively set to star and co-produce.
The story, described as a cross between famed horror films Get Out and Parasite, first found life as a short story on Reddit forum “NoSleep”, where it garnered tens of thousands of views and was awarded the Scariest Story of 2021 award.
It follows young, queer couple Charlotte and Eve who move into a dream house nestled among remote mountains. The book begins with Eve answering a knock at the door from an enigmatic stranger, his wife and three young children. The husband claims to have lived in the house years ago, and asks if he can show his children around it.
After initially declining, Eve changes her mind, and welcomes the family in. From that moment on, the psychological torment begins.
“As soon as the family enters their home, strange things start to happen, and Eve wants nothing more than for them to leave and never come back,” reads the official synopsis.
“But they can’t – or won’t – take the hint that they are no longer welcome.
“Then Charlie suddenly vanishes, and Eve begins to lose her grip on reality. She’s convinced there’s something terribly wrong with the house and its past inhabitants… or is it all in her head?”
At the time of writing, We Used To Live Here has just over 16,000 reviews on GoodReads, with an average rating of 3.85 out of five.
One leading review dubs it as “one of the most terrifying horror stories I’ve ever read”.
According to a press release, the novella is “soon to be a Netflix original movie” starring Lively, though little other information about the adaptation is available.
Kliewer previously confirmed that news of a streamer adaptation was true, thanking original fans on Reddit and admitting that he felt “shell-shocked” at the support he’d received.
It’s not yet clear who Lively will star as in the film, though as she’s the first star to attach her name to the project, it’s likely that she could play one of the leading queer women.
No release date for the We Used To Live Here movie has been to set yet but it’s likely that the team behind it will want a bit of breathing room following the release of Lively’s It Ends With Us.
The adaptation of Hoover’s 2016 novel, which became a huge BookTok hit in 2021 and 2022, has achieved admirable box office success since its cinema release at the beginning of August, though it’s been plagued by several headline-generating controversies.
Fans of the book, which is about domestic violence, were left unimpressed by the way Lively approached marketing and press surrounding the new movie.
She was called out for encouraging audience members to “wear florals” and skirting around the film’s dark subject matter in interviews, with some internet users accusing her of trying to turn a movie depicting a serious social issue into a Barbie-esque phenomenon.
Rumours of a rift between Blake Lively and her co-star Justin Baldoni have also enveloped the film’s press cycle, with reports suggesting Lively drafted in Deadpool & Wolverine editor Shane Reid to cut a whole new version of the film without Baldoni’s knowledge.
The disastrous roll out was worsened when old press interviews featuring Lively began to surface, with one depicting her rudely rebuking a journalist who congratulated her on her pregnancy, and another seeing her use an anti-transgender slur back in the early 2010s.
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