The Devil in the White City is a book that has been bouncing around Hollywood for several years, waiting on an adaptation. Now it appears that Martin Scorsese will be adapting Erik Larson’s bestselling novel, teaming up for the sixth time with Leonardo DiCaprio.
The novel tells the story of H.H. Holmes, America’s first serial killer, who murdered an untold number of people at the World’s Fair in Chicago, in 1893. DiCaprio will take on the role of Holmes with Captain Phillips scribe Billy Ray working on the screenplay, according to the report in Deadline late last night.
Here is the synopsis of The Devil in The White City:
Not long after Jack the Ripper haunted the ill-lit streets of 1888 London, H.H. Holmes (born Herman Webster Mudgett) dispatched somewhere between 27 and 200 people, mostly single young women, in the churning new metropolis of Chicago; many of the murders occurred during (and exploited) the city’s finest moment, the World’s Fair of 1893. Larson’s breathtaking new history is a novelistic yet wholly factual account of the fair and the mass murderer who lurked within it.
If The Revenant doesn’t get DiCaprio that elusive gold statue from the academy later this year, it seems that The Devil in The White City would do the trick. Then again, how many times have we said that very same thing about Leo throughout the years?
