Hammer Acquires Rights to Witch Trial Novella, The Daylight Gate

Hammer has acquired film rights to Jeanette Winterson’s The Daylight Gate, a novella released last year that is based on an English witch trial from the 17th century. Simon Oakes, Vice-Chairman of Exclusive Media and President & CEO of Hammer, made the announcement today and commented on bringing this novel to the big screen:

“The Hammer imprint has really delivered some fantastic new writing and shows the vibrancy and variety of the modern day horror genre. The books under our Arrow Books deal are in themselves a fantastic extension of the Hammer brand, and Jeanette’s novella ‘The Daylight Gate’ is a fresh, exciting and compelling fictional work.”

Here's the official synopsis for The Daylight Gate: "Set in seventeenth-century England during the reign of James I—the monarch who wrote his own book on witchcraft—The Daylight Gate is best-selling writer Jeanette Winterson’s re-creation of a dark history full of complicated morality, sex, and tragic plays for power.

This is a world where to be Catholic is a treasonable offense. A world where England's king vows to rid his country of “witchery popery popery witchery” and condemns the High Mass and Black Mass as heresies punishable by torture, hanging, and burning.

Winterson's literary suspense tale takes us deep into a brutal period of English history, centered on the notorious 1612 Pendle witch trials—an infection of paranoia that crossed the ocean with the Pilgrims and set the scene for the Salem witch hunt.

Good Friday, 1612. Pendle Forest. A gathering of thirteen is interrupted by local magistrate Roger Nowell. Is this a coven or a helpless group of women trying to save their family from the stake? Already two stand accused of witchcraft. The wealthy, respected Alice Nutter tries to defend them, haunted by her own past entanglement with magick. She doesn’t believe in the Devil, but as she fights for justice, her life is endangered by forces visible and invisible."