Garth Ennis’s brutal comic is headed to the screen with The Sadness director Rob Jabbaz. The hardest thing to adapt may be the reason anyone should keep watching.

A Crossed movie sounds like a dare. Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows’s comic imagines civilisation collapsing around people driven to acts of extreme cruelty. Its original publisher sold the first issue as a story for mature readers and made its disturbing violence central to the pitch. Avatar Press

Now Ennis has written a screenplay for a film adaptation, with Rob Jabbaz, director of The Sadness, attached to direct. The film has assembled a cast, but no confirmed release date has been announced. hollywoodreporter.com

Making It Violent Is the Easy Part

Jabbaz is an understandable choice. The Sadness showed that he can put relentless, upsetting horror on screen. That makes it tempting to judge Crossed by one measure: whether the movie goes as far as the comic.

But shock has diminishing returns. Once viewers understand how dangerous this world is, another atrocity does not automatically raise the stakes. The film needs to make us fear for particular people, understand what they stand to lose, and care about the choices they make when every safe option disappears.

The Infected Should Change the Story

The frightening idea behind Crossed is that the threat comes from people, not an impersonal force. That leaves survivors with a problem beyond escaping an attack: how do they decide whom to trust when familiar human behaviour has become impossible to rely on?

A film can explore that through small decisions as effectively as large set pieces. Do you open a door for someone calling for help? Do you believe a friend who says they are safe? Those moments can hold tension because the audience has time to imagine the consequences. If the adaptation rushes from one spectacle to the next, it could lose the dread that makes its premise stick.

Fidelity Needs a Purpose

Ennis writing the screenplay gives the adaptation a direct connection to its source. Jabbaz’s involvement also suggests that the filmmakers are unlikely to approach the material timidly. Neither fact guarantees that every extreme scene from a comic will work in a feature film. hollywoodreporter.com

A page lets a reader pause, look away or control the pace. A movie decides how long an image stays in front of us and what sound accompanies it. That gives the filmmakers power, but it also gives them responsibility: each horrific moment needs to reveal character, deepen the fear or change the story. Reproducing an image simply because readers remember it would be a weak reason to include it.

The Question Worth Asking

Crossed will attract attention for its reputation before anyone sees a frame of the finished film. The director and source material make its capacity for violence easy to believe. What remains unknown is whether the movie can turn that violence into a story people think about after the immediate shock fades.

If it can, Crossed could be genuinely hard to shake. If its only ambition is to prove that it dared to show everything, audiences may remember the ordeal more clearly than the film.

— Sushi

For more screen horror to explore, see our Netflix horror movie guide.