Nick Cutter’s “The Troop” is finally crawling toward the screen

If you have read Nick Cutter’s “The Troop,” you already know this adaptation has the potential to be absolutely disgusting.

Paramount’s genre label Paramount Primal acquired the film rights to Cutter’s 2014 horror novel this week, with Chris Basler hired to write the screenplay. Lyrical Media is producing.

The novel follows a group of boys on their annual scouting trip to a remote island. Their camp is interrupted by a stranger carrying something far worse than the usual campfire-story monster, and the situation turns into a fight against infection, paranoia and each other.

Attempts to turn “The Troop” into a movie have been floating around for more than a decade. Cutter himself said earlier this year that the project had gone through several different versions and that Lyrical Media had a script it liked. Now Paramount Primal has officially picked it up.

For anyone unfamiliar with the book, do not expect cute “Stranger Things” kids bonding in the woods. Cutter goes hard on body horror, disease and the physical misery of watching human beings become increasingly less human. The novel won the James Herbert Award for Horror Writing, and its reputation has only grown since publication.

No director or cast has been announced yet.

Good. Take the time.

If they are adapting that book, I would rather they get the parasites right.