EXCLUSIVE: In competitive bidding, Netflix has landed the landed feature film rights to The Unsound, based on the BOOM! Studios’ graphic novel by Cullen Bunn (The Sixth Gun, Harrow County) & Jack T. Cole. Shazam! director David F. Sandberg is poised to return to the horror genre, where he helmed Lights Out and Annabelle: Creation, the latter of which grossed over $450 million worldwide. Lights Out was a calling-card short film that blossomed into a feature that grossed $148 million worldwide.

The script will be written by Skylar James, whose 29 Mole Street has landed atop the BloodList and Hit List. She is co-creator and exec producer of a limited series for Pearl Street, Gregory Jacobs and Endeavor Content. Sandberg and his longtime collaborator Lotta Losten will produce via their newly created production company Mångata, alongside BOOM! Studios’ Ross Richie and Stephen Christy. Adam Yoelin and James are exec producers.

This becomes the first feature BOOM! Studios has taken to market since the Disney/Fox merger. BOOM! has the largest library of comic book IP outside of Marvel and DC and its deal remains at Fox/Disney, where the company is percolating the Rashida Jones-directed Imagine Agents with 21 Laps and Sugar 23 producing.

In The Unsound, a psychiatrist returns to the insane asylum where her mother once worked and is now a patient, hoping to quell a bloody wave of horror that’s been unleashed. As she descends down the rabbit hole and discovers hard truths about her own past, she comes to understand the hospital is hiding secrets of its own, and perhaps she and her mother have more in common than she realized.

Paradigm and Gotham Group rep Sandberg; Grandview manages James. Jackoway Austen reps both.