The subtle chills in Mark Pellington‘s direction of The Mothman Prophecies (’02) makes him an excellent choice to helm the English-language remake of The Orphanage for New Line Cinema. American mainstream moviegoers weren’t all that interested in seeing Juan Antonio Bayona‘s brilliant 2008 Spanish-language original because…let’s see, what was the reason again?…oh, right, because it had subtitles. Naturally!

Pellington will direct with Guillermo del Toro (the godfather of the ’07 original) and ContraFilm’s Beau Flynn and Tripp Vinson attached to produce. The Ebnglish-language script is by Del Toro and Larry Fessenden.

After seeing Bayona’s film in the 2007 Cannes Film Festival I called it “the creepiest sophisticated ghost story/thriller to come along since Alejandro Amenabar‘s The Others, and if you ask me (or anyone else who’s seen it here) it absolutely deserves a ranking alongside other haunted-by-small-children classics as Jack Clayton‘s The Innocents and Nicolas Roeg‘s Don’t Look Now. It also recalls Robert Wise‘s The Haunting, although the ghosts in that 1961 film were all over 21.”