River Director Sets Occupant at Blumhouse and Focus

Josh Giuliano will write and direct Occupant, his second feature, for Blumhouse Atomic Monster. Focus Features has worldwide rights, with Universal Pictures International handling territories outside the United States. Deadline reported the deal on Friday, and Bloody Disgusting, Dread Central and TheWrap all carried the same terms.

The logline is under wraps. That is the whole of the available plot description, and it is worth saying plainly rather than padding: nobody outside the deal knows what Occupant is about yet.

One Day

River, Giuliano’s debut, opened the Midnight Madness programme at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 10. The Occupant deal was announced on September 11. First-time directors do not usually get a next picture inside 24 hours, and the ones who do are rarely announced with a distributor already attached.

Why the Deal Came Together That Fast

Jason Blum produces. Greg Gilreath and Adam Hendricks produce through Divide/Conquer, and Steven Schneider through Spooky Pictures, with Closer Media in association.

Divide/Conquer is the part worth noticing. The company signed a first-look deal with Blumhouse Atomic Monster in December 2025, with the survival horror film Doomtown named as its first project under it. Occupant is that arrangement doing exactly what a first-look deal exists to do: a director gets hot on a Thursday night, and by Friday the paperwork for his next film is already in a drawer somewhere.

Schneider’s Spooky Pictures, which he founded with Roy Lee in 2020, also produced River, so that thread runs straight through. The company’s recent shelf includes Watcher, Late Night with the Devil and Strange Darling, and Schneider produced Paranormal Activity back when nobody had heard of any of this.

Where You Know Giuliano From

River puts three estranged siblings on a remote waterway to scatter their father’s ashes. The boat dies. There is no cell service. Something comes out of the trees. Jane Levy and Jessica Rothe play the sisters, Max Mattern the younger brother, and Dane DiLiegro the killer. Independent Film Company has it for theaters and it streams on Shudder after that. We covered the TIFF premiere and the two final girls in the boat earlier this week.

No trailer has been released, which is its own small piece of information: the film went to Toronto on reviews and a handful of stills and came out the other side with a studio deal.

Giuliano, for his part, is not finished with the river. Leaving TheWrap’s festival studio in Toronto, he said he is “thinking about” a sequel.

A Note on the Title

There is already a film called Occupant. Henry S. Miller’s 2011 thriller strands a young New Yorker in his late grandmother’s rent-controlled apartment, where he has to stay put for twelve days to keep the lease and does not handle it well. Film titles are not trademarked and duplicates are routine, but anyone searching for the Blumhouse picture over the next two years is going to meet that apartment first.