Scheherazade meets Hansel and Gretel in Netflix’s latest dark fantasy, Nightbooks. Having premiered just yesterday, Flixpatrol reports the film is already the fourth most popular movie on Netflix worldwide.
Based on J.A. White’s children’s novel of the same name, Nightbooks is directed by David Yarovesky, whose filmography consists of lesser-known horror films like The Hive and Brightburn. Nightbooks keeps with the source texts’ demographic, however. It’s dark in setting but still rated PG.
Krysten Ritter (Jessica Jones, Breaking Bad) plays the witch Natacha in apartment 4B, who spirits Alex Mosher (Winslow Fegley) away from his Brooklyn, Apartment. There Alex joins Yazmin (Lidya Jewett), another girl trapped by the Witch. Alex makes himself useful to the sorceress by reading from the many horror stories he had written while growing up a fan of thrillers — film or literature.
The love of the horror genre goes beyond narrative, too. The soundtrack features a cover of “Cry Little Sister” from the 1987 vampire flick The Lost Boys by Scottish synth-pop trio CHVRCHES. The band, who just released their fourth LP Screen Violence, talked to Uproxx about how horror has influenced their discography and, in a statement on the cover, admitted “we have talked about covering ‘Cry Little Sister’ for years and this seemed like the perfect moment to do it.”
You can listen to the cover below.
FlixPatrol launched in April 2019. The site filters publicly available data on streaming services’ trending series and regional popularity, then synthesizes data into an in-house algorithm to rank popular services’ best-performing TVs and movies. Services tracked include Netflix, HBO Max, and Google Play.
Nightbooks is streaming on Netflix.
