With Warner Bros.’ Aquaman making more than $1.1 billion worldwide and counting, the highest yet for a DC Comics movie, you best believe there will be a sequel coming at some point. Curiously, no serious plans to get the follow-up film into motion have yet been announced. Neither director James Wan nor stars Jason Momoa and Amber Heard have been confirmed as even being in talks to come back for a sequel. Curiouser still, though there seems to be no rush to develop plans for a second film as a direct continuation, there is talk of a spinoff feature, one that would center on the deepest reaches of the underworld of Aquaman and the denizens who dwell there.

As THR reports, Warner Bros. is in the process of developing The Trench, a “horror-tinged” spinoff movie that would delve into the title territory that shares its name with the creatures that inhabit it. For folks who have seen the movie (and that really should be everyone at this point, it’s fantastic in every sense of the word), you’ll know that the battle between Arthur Curry and Mera and the deep-sea creatures is easily the most harrowing sequence in the film. It’s a fun bit of dark mythology that left fans wanting to see more, and that’s exactly what the studio now has in mind. They’ve already hired a pair of up-and-coming scribes, Noah Gardner and Aidan Fitzgerald, to write the horror script with Wan and Peter Safran producing.

The relatively modestly budgeted spinoff, which won’t feature the main cast of Aquaman (at least not in any significant way), aims to expand on the story of The Trench, a tribe of sea-dwellers who survived the destruction of Atlantis only to be thrown into the deep, dark Marianas Trench. There, evolutionary pressures forced The Trench to diverge from the humanoid Atlanteans and into the monstrous creations we saw in Aquaman.

Created by Geoff Johns in the fall of 2011 for the launch of DC Comics’ The New 52 campaign, The Trench first arrived in “Aquaman #1” as antagonists of the title character and scourge of surface-dwellers everywhere:

The superstar creators from BLACKEST NIGHT and BRIGHTEST DAY reunite to take AQUAMAN to amazing new depths! Aquaman has renounced the throne of Atlantis – but the sea will not release Arthur Curry so easily.

Now, from a forgotten corner of the ocean emerges… The Trench! A broken race of creatures that should not exist, an unspeakable need driving them, The Trench will be the most talked-about new characters in the DC Universe!

The Trench have appeared in the animated movie Justice League: Throne of Atlantis and the video game Injustice 2, but now it seems they’ll get a chance to fully explore their mythology in another big-screen adventure. We’ll need to see a bit more on this one before we’re fully on board, but color us intrigued.