Thomas Ligotti's Purity Set for Film

Film maker Russ Bellew has established a couple social networking sites aimed at launching a film adaptation of Thomas Ligotti's "Purity." Despite some uncertainty about the project expressed last week on Thomas Ligotti Online, it appears there's a chance the venture will move forward. Bellew hopes to raise a few hundred dollars, giving the project a meager operating fund. This will be a completely independent movie. Here's a synopsis for the unfamiliar:

Living in a dark and dangerous neighborhood, Daniel is a strange young man, living on the fringes of society with his very off beat family. One night Dad has an unexpected visitor and Daniel decides to go to his friend Candy's house and show her the fruits of his Dad's experiment, a squat jar containing a green jelly-like substance. Intertwined with a child killer, drug dealers, and murder, Daniel has to step carefully through this surreal landscape in order to survive.

If successful, getting "Purity" on screen will mark the second time a Ligotti work has been filmed. 2008 saw the first, The Frolic, a short film which made do with similarly limited resources. Luckily, a large number of Ligotti's stories open themselves to film without requiring a large set of digital wizardry. Tales like "The Frolic" and "Purity" are deeply psychological. This means a director needs to round up skilled actors and erect a suitably eerie atmosphere - no small order, but doable without the thousands of dollars required for nightmarish creatures or special effects. For "Purity," at least, the real estate meltdown has greatly increased the number of viable sets.

"Purity" is an exceptionally bleak horror story that has begged to get on film. Its reverence for dereliction and creepy philosophical conjectures would, if done right, help establish a promising history for Ligottian cinema. This is all the more important when considering previous filmable pieces that never quite made it to the production stage: Crampton, "In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land," and Michigan Basement (an unpublished screen play co-written by Thomas Ligotti and Brandon Trenz), among others. Hopefully, Purity will join The Frolic on DVD in the next couple years.

-Grim Blogger