Paramount Primal Acquires Nick Cutter's Horror Novel 'The Troop' for Feature Adaptation
Paramount Primal, the genre label launched by the producers behind Barbarian, has acquired film rights to Nick Cutter's 2014 horror novel The Troop, with Chris Basler set to write the adaptation (Deadline).
The novel follows a troop of boys on their annual scout camping trip on a remote island. An intruder arrives carrying a parasitic infection, and the boys are forced into a struggle for survival against the infected and against each other. Cutter's book won the James Herbert Award for Horror Writing (Deadline).
Nick Cutter is the pseudonym of Craig Davidson, a USA Today bestselling author. Under the Cutter name, Davidson has also written The Deep, Little Heaven, The Dorians, The Queen, and The Handyman Method, the last co-written with Andrew F. Sullivan. Under his own name, his fiction includes Rust and Bone and The Saturday Night Ghost Club (Deadline).
Lyrical Media is set to produce the adaptation. The company's credits include Adam Wingard's A24 action thriller Onslaught and the upcoming Osgood Perkins film The Young People. Tracy Rosenblum is overseeing the project for Paramount Primal (Deadline).
Basler has developed film and television projects with Blumhouse, Bad Robot, Annapurna, the Picture Co., Tango, Hivemind, Cloud Nine, and the Black List — a résumé that places him squarely in the genre and elevated-thriller space the project calls for. He is represented by UTA, Untitled, and Ziffren Brittenham. Davidson is represented by UTA and Kirby Kim at Janklow & Nesbit Associates (Deadline).
Paramount Primal is run by J.D. Lifshitz and Raphael Margules, the principals of BoulderLight Pictures, the production company behind the 2022 horror hit Barbarian (Deadline; The Hollywood Reporter). Paramount tapped the duo to lead the new label in September 2025.
The label was formally unveiled in July 2026 with the announcement of a new A Nightmare on Elm Street movie, to be released domestically — the United States and Canada — by Paramount. Primal's development slate also includes Tower Defense, an R-rated fantasy from writer Evan Daugherty; Sweet Spot, a high-concept thriller penned by Nic Curcio and Kirby Gladstein; and Tyler Falbo's R-rated comedy Boys for Life, which is currently in production (Deadline).
No release date has been set for The Troop.
