Let's all get stoned and check out a movie version of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery

By William Hughes | July 26, 2018 | 12:05am

Aux Features Film

It’s not wholly surprising that Shirley Jackson’s 1948 short story The Lottery has never been adapted to film. For one thing, it really is a short story, clocking in at just a few brief pages before landing at its grim conclusion. For another, that twist ending has now been out in the ether for going-on 70 years, and while time hasn’t sapped the original text’s gradually building ability to unsettle or shock, it does strip a certain level of tension out of any possible adaptation. As such, it’s probably going to take a lot of expansion and effort to get the tale to something resembling feature length, a fact that hasn’t deterred Paramount from announcing that it’s going to try to get within a stone’s throw of success with an attempt.

That’s per Deadline, which reports that a film version of Jackson’s tale of small-town folksiness, tradition, and public execution is being adapted for the screen, with Jake Wade Wall, from the 2007 remake of The Hitcher, handling scripting duties. There are plenty of producers attached, but no director as of yet; meanwhile, one exec noted that Wall’s treatment of the material will update it for the modern era. Sounds good: Jackson’s old-timey “slips of paper” method for determining each year’s lottery “winner” is hopelessly out-dated at this point; we can’t wait to hear a modern-day Tessie Hutchinson scream about how unfair her death is because there were update issues on her husband’s copy of the Lottry mobile app.