Hammer Films Buys Every Susan Hill Story, and I Am Already Making a List

Hammer Films has bought the rights to everything Susan Hill has ever written. Not just one book, not an option on her next thing. All of it, as reported by Bloody Disgusting, which is the kind of news that makes me put my coffee down and read the sentence twice.

If the name Susan Hill means nothing to you, here is the short version. She is a British author who has been writing quiet, unsettling fiction since the 1970s, and her most famous book is The Woman in Black, a slim ghost story about a solicitor sent to sort through the estate of a dead woman in a remote house, and the figure he keeps seeing at the edges of things. Hammer adapted it into the 2012 film starring Daniel Radcliffe, which did well enough at the box office that it is still the reason most people know her name at all. It is also the reason this deal makes complete sense rather than coming out of nowhere. Hammer already knows what a Susan Hill adaptation looks like when it works.

Why would a studio buy an author's whole back catalogue?

Because Susan Hill has written a lot more than one ghost story, and most of it has never made it to a screen. She has a run of other supernatural and psychological novels that fit exactly the mood Hammer trades in: old houses, bad weather, things that are wrong in a way nobody can quite name. Buying the complete works rather than a single title means a studio is not negotiating book by book every time something fits their slate. It is a bet on an author rather than one story, and it tells you Hammer thinks there is more than one Woman in Black hiding in that bibliography.

It is also, I will be honest, a slightly unusual move. Studios option individual books constantly. Buying the whole output of a living author in one deal is the kind of thing that happens when someone at the studio has clearly read everything she has written and wants first claim on all of it before anyone else gets the idea.

What else has Susan Hill actually written?

This is the bit I am most excited about, because her catalogue goes well beyond the one story most people know. She has written other ghost stories in a similar register to The Woman in Black, standalone supernatural fiction, and a long-running series of crime novels that are less her horror side but still built on the same close, controlled sense of dread. For a cosy horror reader, the appeal is that her work tends to be short, sharp and genuinely unsettling rather than reliant on jump scares, which is exactly the kind of thing that adapts well into a single evening's film rather than a franchise that outstays its welcome.

I do not know yet which titles Hammer is planning to move on first, because the report itself does not say, and I am not going to invent a slate that does not exist. What I can tell you is that if they go looking for the next one in the vein of The Woman in Black, there is clearly more than enough material there to choose from.

Does this mean The Woman in Black is getting a sequel?

Not as far as anything confirmed says. This deal is about the rights to her written work generally, not an announcement of a specific new film. It is easy to see the Daniel Radcliffe film and assume a follow-up is the obvious next move, but Hammer buying her complete works suggests they are thinking wider than one more go at the same story. A studio does not need the rights to an entire bibliography just to make a sequel to one of them.

What it does mean, realistically, is that Susan Hill's name is about to become a lot more familiar to people who only ever knew it from one film. I have had a couple of her other novels on my shelf for a while without getting round to them, which feels like exactly the sort of thing a deal like this should push me into finally doing. If Hammer is about to put her stories on screen properly, the least I can do is read them before everyone else does.

I will be keeping an eye on which title gets announced first, and if it is anywhere near as good as The Woman in Black, this autumn is about to get considerably more interesting.