Though one could argue that Nicolas Winding Refn has already made a number of horror films, he now looks poised to tackle the genre in earnest—on a big studio movie, no less.  Deadline reports that the Drive director is in early talks to helm The Bringing, a haunted hotel pic for Sony Pictures.  The idea for the film was spurred by the strange death of a woman at the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles who was found in the water tanks.  Video surfaced of the woman acting erratically in the hotel elevator, and the Cecil has been home to a number of suicides over the years.  The event inspired Brandon and Phillip Murphy to pen a script on spec revolving around a man investigating a death at the hotel, only to find himself stumbling into a nightmare.

Hit the jump for more on the project and Refn’s current slate.

Sony Pictures acquired the spec for The Bringing in February as part of a heated bidding war, and while Refn has reached the point in his career where he’s normally courted for projects, Deadline notes that he actively sought this one out.  The filmmaker is coming off the surrealistic Only God Forgives, which played more like a fever dream than a narrative feature, and one can only imagine what kind of terror Refn might dream up with a haunted hotel premise.

What’s also interesting about The Bringing is that the film would bring Refn into the Hollywood studio system.  Though the director previously planned on making another film with Carey Mulligan after Only God Forgives, he has yet to settle on a follow-up project.  He developed a Logan’s Run remake at Warner Bros. for a couple of years, but eventually departed the project over scheduling and commitment issues.  Hopefully the same problem doesn’t occur with The Bringing, because I’m incredibly curious to see what Refn could do with this material.