From genre-bending horror-comedy nightmares Dogtooth and The Lobster to Oscar favorite The Favourite, Yorgos Lanthimos is a director with quite the wide-varying purview. Now, it looks as though his next project might take him into genres and tones he's never explicitly explored before, while still feeling well within his (rather large) wheelhouse. Via The Hollywood Reporter, Lanthimos is in talks to direct the film adaptation of novel The Hawkline Monster, a unique book with quite the Hollywood history.

Written by eclectic black comedy writer Richard Brautigan, The Hawkline Monster follows two gunslingers in the old west who are hired by a young woman named Magic Child to deal with something in her house. That "something" turns out to be a "monster" that lives beneath the Hawkline home in a series of "ice caves," turning the work into a fascinating hybrid between western, horror, fantasy, and surreal comedy. Can't you just picture the Lanthimos version? Colin Farrell and John C. Reilly could play the gunslingers!

Lanthimos is not the first person to circle the project, however. Hal Ashby tried to make the film for a couple of decades, attaching stars like Jack Nicholson, Harry Dean Stanton and Jeff Bridges in the process -- but it never happened, even with a screenplay by Brautigan himself. After that, Tim Burton tried to make his version, with Nicholson and Clint Eastwood attached -- but that fell apart too. Now, Lanthimos is the man of the hour, working with producers like Roy Lee (It), Andrew Trapani (Winchester), and Steven Schneider (Pet Sematary). Will Lanthimos see the project to the finish line? Or is he the latest A-list director to fall victim to the Hawkline Monster's curse?

For more on Lanthimos, check out the intel on his latest miniseries and Jim Thompson crime adaptation. Plus -- here he is gabbing about directing with a bunch of other great directors!