As the queen of American weird fiction, Shirley Jackson’s stories and novels have perhaps been neglected by Hollywood more than her reputation and talent would merit.



That’s possibly because Jackson’s vast oeuvre could be deemed largely unfilmable for modern audiences, relying on the building of tension, dread and disquiet through the subtle progression of narratives that are in many cases built on internal monologues.

Now, though, one of Jackson’s best-loved novels is coming to the big screen in the shape of her 1961 triumph – and to my mind her best book – We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

The Hollywood Reporter revealed this week that filming began in Dublin this month on an adaptation co-produced by Michael Douglas and directed by Stacie Passon, in what is the centenary year of Jackson’s birth.

The first star announced was Sebastian Stan, who played the Winter Soldier in the Captain America movies. Stan’s role as Charles Blackwood, while an important one in the plot, is relatively minor compared to the two main characters, Constance and Mary Katherine Blackwood, and their casting announcements came later on Wednesday – Alexandra Daddario (from the Percy Jackson series) will play elder sibling Constance, while American Horror Story’s Taissa Farmiga will be Mary Katherine – Merricat to her small family.

Constance and Merricat exist together with their rather befuddled Uncle Julian in a rambling, tumbledown pile, all that remains of a once grand dynasty which was all but wiped out when someone put arsenic into the sugar bowl which most of the family sprinkled on their desert.

Elder sister Constance is generally thought to have committed the deed, though nothing could be proved. Still, the townsfolk are convinced that was the case and the killings have passed into local legend, children singing rhymes about the deaths to Merricat as she ventures infrequently into civilisation to gather supplies.

They live a life of sequestered, fading grandeur, which is only interrupted with the arrival of cousin Charles, who begins to court pale Constance. But is he just trying to get his hands on the family silver? And tensions are rising between the Blackwoods and the townsfolk …

A gothic enough tale, but related in such pedestrian terms barely scratches the surface of Jackson’s novel. The devil is in the detail of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the story told through the eyes of troubled Merricat and her unsettling rituals – she hangs totems and fetishes around the bounds of the Blackwood land to protect the remains of the family – and her thoughts are very dark indeed.

The novel is a masterpiece of the macabre, and the tension ratcheted up by Jackson, who died in 1965 after being troubled with demons of her own in the shape of painkillers and alcohol, is almost unbearable.

As such, it is difficult to see just how it could be packaged up for cinema audiences who perhaps like their blockbusters big on action and light on twisted introspection. However, with director Passon also having a credit for the Amazon Studios’ transgender drama Transparent as well as the Sundance hit Concussion, which she wrote and directed, perhaps she has an eye for the offbeat which might just pull off the adaptation.

If so, an impressive adaptation of a Shirley Jackson novel will have been a long-time coming. Only two of her stories have made it to the big screen – 1957’s Lizzie, based on her short story The Bird’s Nest being the first.

Perhaps Jackson’s most famous novel, The Haunting of Hill House, has been filmed twice, both times as The Haunting. The 1963 version of this story of a group of psychics invited to stay at a haunted house is by far the best, transferring Jackson’s prose into cramped monochrome menace with the unforgettable scene where one character sharing a bed with another talks of her growing fears, only to find when the light is switched on that her roommate is nowhere near. So whose hand has she been holding? The less said about the fairly execrable 1999 remake the better.

Perhaps Jackson’s most famous short story, The Lottery, has been adapted three times, twice for television (though the 1996 version is only loosely based on Jackson’s story, and attempts to form some kind of sequel) and once as a short film in 1969.

Whether We Have Always Lived In The Castle is indeed even capable of being successfully filmed we’ll have to wait and see. But if it opens up Jackson’s work to a wider audience in her centenary year, then it’ll have some merit at least.