Another Reddit tale comes to life in the upcoming thriller I Pretended to Be a Missing Girl, which has Sydney Sweeney (Immaculate) attached to both star in and produce.

The Hollywood Reporter lets us know today that Warner Bros. has picked up the rights to the hot package, which all began with a tale posted on Reddit by English teacher Joe Cote.

The full title of Cote’s Reddit tale was I pretended to be a missing girl so I could rob her family, and it was published in the popular channel reddit/nosleep four years ago.

THR details that the original Reddit short story “centers on a young woman who shows up at a family’s doorsteps ten years after their 18-year-old daughter went missing.

“Her plan is to convince the family she is their missing child, and stay just for one night — long enough to steal some valuables and get away.”

Academy Award winning screenwriter Eric Roth (Wolfen, Forrest Gump, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Killers of the Flower Moon) is adapting the tale for the screen.

Sydney Sweeney will produce through her banner Fifty-Fifty Films.

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Cinderella’s stepsisters mutilating their feet so they can fit into slippers, a heartbroken mermaid taking her own life, Red Riding Hood unknowingly cannibalizing her grandmother — these and other upsetting details tend to be omitted from modernizations of classic fairy tales. This kind of watering-down, often called “Disneyfication” for obvious reasons, may be seen as a problematic practice, but as it happens, the commercial and sterile variants only make their darker counterparts more effective.

One such case is 1997’s Snow White: A Tale of Terror, a most aberrant fairy tale adaptation.

Fairy tales and suchlike are eternal in show business, yet in and after the 1990s they were especially prolific, due in large part to Disney’s enviable success with the model. And it wasn’t just animated adaptations getting the greenlight either; live-action takes were also popular. However, Michael Cohn’s flesh-and-blood treatment of the always-fashionable “Snow White” story was not like anything else coming out at the time. Instead, it veered a ways off the beaten path of safe and palatable. Perhaps that’s why it ended up on Showtime, rather than going to theaters as originally planned.

Snow White: A Tale of Terror could have come as a shock to those viewers who, somehow, had never been made aware of the “real” story of Snow White found in the Brothers Grimm collection. Even still, this cinematic exercise, while far more keen on keeping those specific plot points omitted by Disney and others, isn’t above the use of creative license. After revisions, the film dropped its present-day setting; under the title of “Snow White and the Black Forest,” the production was once set in New York and featured gang members in place of the seven dwarves.

Image: Monica Keena as Lilli and Gil Bellows as Will in Snow White: A Tale of Terror.

After being long seen as a hero in the Alien series, Sigourney Weaver was delighted to be a villain. “The wicked part of her is just delicious to play,” Weaver told the Los Angeles Times, back in 1996. The “her” in question was, of course, the increasingly malicious stepmother to Snow White, who was now christened Lilliana in this reinterpretation. The stepmother herself was also bestowed an actual name as opposed to just a narrative identifier; Weaver’s role was Lady Claudia, the French noblewoman who marries Lilliana’s widowered father, played by Sam Neill, and later lives to torment her fair-skinned stepdaughter.

In adapting fairy tales, adding original and new content can pose a challenge, but in Snow White: A Tale of Terror, the padding is successful, not to mention macabre. If nothing else, the extra narrative attention now paid to Weaver’s Lady Claudia, rather than the story’s supposed protagonist, ends up being the most positive aspect here, after the impressive production values. This film was a vehicle for Weaver, who devoured her role with visible eagerness.

The horrors that befell Lilliana (Monica Keena), or Lilli for short, were not the first or only bad things to happen in this film’s universe. There is no storybook-worthy portrait of happiness before the arrival of Lady Claudia — far from it, seeing as how the outset encompasses the woeful death of Lilli’s pregnant mother (Joanna Roth) and the traumatic birth of Lilli. Fittingly for a film subtitled A Tale of Terror, there is an intentional shortage of upbeat moments. Even the calmer portions shown early on are brimming with melancholy or tension. And naturally, the source of said unease is that always-discordant relationship between Claudia and Lilli.

Image: Sigourney Weaver as Claudia and Sam Neill as Frederick in Snow White: A Tale of Terror.

Two abrupt and sizable transitions of time occur within the film’s first act, leaving the audience to imagine the missing details of Claudia and Lilli’s continuing friction. However, helping fill in the gaps is the persuasive pairing of scenes that begins with the now-teenage stepdaughter rebuffing her stepmother’s gift for the upcoming ball: A dress Claudia herself wore in her youth. Weaver’s pregnant character, the recipient of said ball, then asks why she and Keena’s character must always struggle. That flicker of sympathy for the stepmother would soon be intensified after Lilli’s deliberate act of upstaging; at the party, she instead wears a lavish and show-stopping gown once belonging to her late mother, and Neill’s character is visibly taken by the gesture. As to be expected, outshining and offending Claudia, as well as provoking her miscarriage, has grave consequences for Snow White and anyone she cares about.

There is a divide when it comes to expounding on the origins of villains. While some prefer they just be villainous without clear or overly stated cause, others might welcome an introspective backstory. This film offers a compromise that everyone should be happy with; Claudia’s malevolence has unmistakable motivation, yet the story also doesn’t hammer away at it. That inevitable transformation into fiendish and bitter sorceress is not a slow one, and it most certainly doesn’t come out of nowhere. Upon losing her baby and learning she’s now infertile, Claudia starts to better resemble her literary parallel. The queen demands that her brother (Miroslav Táborský) kill Lilli first, then return with the girl’s removed organs as proof of death. Somewhat like most retellings of the Grimm fairy tale, though, the victim escapes death and is taken in by seven strangers.

From there the film makes substantial changes to its basis. The seven dwarves, for instance, are a far cry from their family-friendly Disney analogs, and Lilli even finds herself preferring the leader of this combative sevensome (Gil Bellows) to the story’s actual prince (David Conrad). And in horror fashion, Weaver’s growingly nefarious character amasses a body count, among other heinous crimes, as she threatens Lilli’s life again and again, and Snow White assumes Final Girl-like determination in the film’s climactic standoff. In the end, the blueprint of the Grimm model is still recognizable beneath A Tale of Terror’s gruesome and, at times, vulgar veneer. Only now, there are these curves in the plot that shove this fairy tale squarely into more bleak and less visited territory, at least as far as contemporary fairy tale films go.

Although this gothic and horror reimagining isn’t the first — and it definitely won’t be the last — to take an indelicate approach to “Snow White,” that evident refusal to avoid risks here, particularly in a past era of inoffensive fairy tales films, makes A Tale of Terror stand out even more so. Admittedly, the pacing and general lack of interesting characters are both issues, however, those shortcomings are offset by Sigourney Weaver’s brilliant turn as the id-driven and monstrous witch. She brings the magic whenever this film’s other parts aren’t quite as charming.

Image: Sigourney Weaver and Monica Keena in Snow White: A Tale of Terror (1997).

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Ahead of the new live action Snow White movie starring Rachel Zegler, which will release in theaters beginning tonight, The Horror Collective has announced that their indie mockbuster The Death of Snow White is headed to theaters in April. Deadline debuted the trailer today.

The Death of Snow White brings fantasy horror to the big screen on April 18, 2025. The film is then expected to arrive on Digital outlets sometime this summer, Deadline also notes.

Watch the official trailer for The Death of Snow White below.

“After the mysterious death of Snow White, her closest friends embark on a journey to uncover the truth behind her demise. As secrets unravel and betrayal surfaces, they realize the darkness that lurks beneath the surface of their seemingly idyllic kingdom.

“With twists and turns at every corner, they must navigate through danger to seek justice and avenge their friend’s tragic end.”

Sanae Loutsis, Chelsea Edmundson, Tristan Nokes, Meredith Binder, Colin Miller, and Dillon Moore star in the indie mockbuster from Real Fiction and STL Productions.

Jason Brooks directed the upcoming film, written by Brooks and Naomi Mechem-Miller.

The Death of Snow White is the latest in a long line of horror movies exploiting public domain properties, with slasher Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey kickstarting the trend in earnest.

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Filming is underway in Louisiana on the new psychological horror movie Lake Vernon, and Variety has announced the cast this morning.

Former NFL star turned filmmaker Vernon Davis (The Ritual Killer) produces and stars in the film alongside Malcolm Goodwin (“Reacher”), David Anders (“The Vampire Diaries”), Olivia Grace Applegate (“Love and Death”), Andrea Sixtos (“Arrow”) and Tommy Wiseau (Big Shark).

Not only does Davis star and produce, but Lake Vernon is adapted from a story by Davis and Tiffany Toney. The story was adapted for the screen by director Aaron Jay Rome and writer/producer Isaiah LaBorde.

In the film, “Old wounds resurface when a fractured group of friends reunites for a weekend retreat at an exclusive lakeside sanctuary,” the film’s official logline reads. “As buried tensions and unspoken betrayals bubble to the surface, the lake itself seems to be listening — watching — offering impossible miracles at a cost none of them understand. In the stillness of Lake Vernon, healing and horror are one and the same.”

Lake Vernon is currently being described as “a chilling psychological horror in the vein of Talk to Me and The Invitation.” Also noteworthy is that Scott Conrad, an Academy Award winner for editing Rocky, is attached to edit the film.

With the psychological horror movie currently filming now in Baton Rouge, expect to hear more news soon.

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