Craig Zobel is directing the feature adaptation of Something Is Killing the Children, the BOOM! Studios comic about a town where only the children can see the monsters killing them. Blumhouse announced him at its BlumFest panel at New York Comic Con on Friday, seven years after the first issue arrived.
James Tynion IV created the series in 2019 with artist Werther Dell’Edera, and BOOM!, now an imprint of Penguin Random House, has published it ever since. Its lead is Erica Slaughter, a monster hunter working for a secretive organization that is more invested in keeping the creatures hidden than in saving anyone they take.
Blumhouse filled the rest of the panel with dated titles, sending Rob Savage’s Molepeople to theaters on August 27, 2027 and unveiling the trailer for Mike Flanagan’s The Exorcist: Martyrs.
Zobel Came to This From ‘The Hunt’ and ‘Outcast’
Zobel has worked for Jason Blum before, directing The Hunt for Blumhouse in 2020 after breaking through with Compliance in 2012 and following it with Z for Zachariah. He has also adapted a horror comic for television once already, directing an episode of Cinemax’s Outcast, taken from Robert Kirkman and Paul Azaceta’s series about a man who drives demons out of people. On the prestige side he directed all seven episodes of Mare of Easttown and three of The Penguin, executive producing both.
Netflix Has Had a Series in Development Since 2021
This is not the comic’s first screen plan. Netflix set a live-action series in 2021 with Mike Flanagan and Trevor Macy attached, that version fell away, and Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese of Dark took the project over in 2023. Asked about it by Fangoria in August 2025, Tynion said there was “nothing I am allowed to say” beyond the fact that the development was continuing, and Blumhouse has not said how its film and animated series relate to that series.
Children Die in the Script, Tynion Says
Zobel told the BlumFest crowd that the script holds “firehoses of blood,” according to Dread Central’s report from the room, and Tynion followed him by promising the adaptation keeps what the comic does to its youngest characters. “We rip a kid in half in the first issue,” he said. “I promise you, there are kids who die in the script.”
Tynion had set that up earlier in the week, telling Entertainment Weekly that what he can say about Blumhouse is that “they are not afraid of stories that put children in peril,” and calling Blum a longtime advocate for the series.
An Adult Animated Series Is Moving in Parallel
Blumhouse is developing an adult animated series alongside the film, with Tynion adapting it himself and executive producing, and Dell’Edera attached as co-executive producer and visual development consultant.
Stephen Christy and Tynion produce the feature for BOOM! and Penguin Random House, with Blum producing for Blumhouse, Dell’Edera co-producing, and Shaun Sutton, Ryan Turek, Adam Yoelin and Mette Norkjaer executive producing.
The comic has sold more than five million copies worldwide and been translated into more than twenty languages across fourteen countries, and it is closing in on its fiftieth issue with BOOM! committed to running it to at least a hundred.
.jpg?mbid=social_retweet "Watch Slayyyter Rock a Raccoon Pelt in I Think Hes Got a Girl Video")
