When Gretchen Felker-Martin’s debut novel Manhunt arrived in 2022—complete with a cover cleverly alluding to one of the book’s recurring plotlines, the need for its trans female characters to hunt feral men for their testicles, lest they suffer a horrifying fate—its blend of emotional subtleties and overt horror-as-metaphor grotesqueries drew immediate strong reviews. What it did not do was kick off the usual wave of TV and film adaptation plans, presumably because the book’s deliberately messy messages surrounding gender identity—and, say, the bit where a group of fascist trans-exclusionary radical feminists get dubbed “The Knights Of J.K. Rowling”—was a bit spicy for Hollywood to chew up and comfortably digest.
Cut to today, when a new interview posted at autostraddle with Matrix co-creator Lilly Wachowski. Besides being a fascinating conversation in its own right, the interview ends with Wachowski casually revealing that she’s currently in the works on adaptations of “a couple of different trans books,” including Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox…and Manhunt. Felker-Martin hopped on social media to confirm the news, writing that “I’m adapting MANHUNT for TV with Lilly Wachowski, and I couldn’t be prouder or more excited to be writing it. We’re going to do our damnedest to bring this thing kicking, screaming, and queer as hell onto the screen.”
It’s not clear yet capacity Wachowski will fill on the project; in her last two TV shows, Netflix’s planet-spanning Sense8 and the far more down-to-earth Abby Enany project Work In Progress, she went the multi-hyphenate route, writing and directing multiple episodes while also serving as a producer. She’s never directly tackled horror—which Manhunt, which takes place in a world where high testosterone turns people into feral beasts who (and we’re quoting the very positive NPR review here) “exist only to consume flesh and to rape,” traffics in pretty heavily. On the other hand, she’s never been afraid of Big Fucking Ideas, which Felker-Martin’s novel is absolutely packed with. Color us tentatively stoked.