New Line Wins the Remake Rights to Italy's Oscar Entry The Spiral

New Line Cinema has won the bidding for The Spiral, the Italian horror film Italy has chosen as its Best International Feature entry, and it plans to release the original and make an English-language remake. That is the headline. What is worth sitting with is the film itself, because I suspect a lot of people are about to hear the title without ever having seen it.

What is The Spiral (L'Estranea)?

The Spiral, called L'Estranea in Italy, is a Faustian horror film from director Paolo Strippoli. "Faustian" just means a bargain with the devil, the old story of someone getting what they want and then finding out what it costs. It reached Italian cinemas in October, and it is now Italy's submission for the Best International Feature Oscar.

It is a proper European co-production with a serious cast: Jasmine Trinca, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Romana Maggiora Vergano and Adriano Giannini. It premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival, which is not a place horror usually gets to sit at the grown-ups' table. I like seeing that, and it is a big part of why I enjoy hunting for horror from outside Hollywood. Some of the strangest, best-looking scary films I have watched on a sofa came with subtitles.

I should be honest about the reception, because I have not seen it yet. The reviews I have found are split. One critic called it stylish but increasingly repetitive, another called it silly, devilish fun. That actually makes me more curious, not less. A film that divides a room is usually worth a Friday night.

What has New Line actually announced?

The story was first reported by Deadline, and Bloody Disgusting picked it up: you can read Bloody Disgusting's report here. In short, New Line won a competitive bidding process for the English-language remake rights. It also picked up distribution rights to the Italian original in the US, Canada and a handful of territories in Asia.

The plan for the original is a limited cinema run before the end of the year, which is the usual route for qualifying a film for awards consideration. So if you are in the US, the real film, in Italian, with subtitles, should reach a screen near you without waiting for anybody's remake. I would genuinely rather you saw that one first.

Here is what has not been announced, and I would rather say so than guess. There is no director for the remake, no cast, no writer that I can find, and no start date or release date. At the moment it is a studio that has bought the right to make a film, which is a very long way from a film. Plenty of remake deals quietly go nowhere, and some take years. If you see a cast list floating about before there is an official one, treat it with suspicion.

For anyone new to the name, New Line is the studio behind a long run of horror franchises, including The Conjuring films and It. It knows what a scary audience looks like, which is the encouraging part.

Should we be worried about the remake?

I am allowed to be a bit sceptical, and I am. English-language remakes of foreign horror are a mixed bag at best. Some keep the nerve of the original. Others sand every odd edge off it, drop the local texture that made it unsettling, and hand you something that looks the part but has lost the point. The remakes that work tend to remember that the original was strange for a reason.

The flip side is that a remake deal usually puts a smaller film in front of far more people, and some of those people will go looking for the original afterwards. If that happens here, good. I would be pleased if even a few more horror fans ended up watching an Italian film with the subtitles on because a big studio told them to.

My own rule is simple: original first, remake second, and judge each one on its own terms. I will report back the moment there is something concrete to report, a director, a cast, anything real.

So here is my question for you. Are you a watch-the-original-first person, or do you wait and see what the remake does with it? And if you have already seen The Spiral, tell me where you land, though please keep the spoilers out of it. I would like to go in cold.