“Scary Teacher” is leaving the phone screen

The viral game “Scary Teacher” is being developed as a horror movie, with veteran producers Joe Roth and Jeff Kirschenbaum behind the feature. Cory Todd Hughes and Adrian Speckert are writing the screenplay.

If you never played it, the game revolves around a sadistic teacher who torments her students, with the player sneaking through her house and pulling elaborate pranks to get revenge. Translating that loop into a feature is actually a weird little challenge. A game lets you keep resetting the joke. A movie eventually has to make Miss T genuinely dangerous or the whole thing risks becoming ninety minutes of elaborate doorbell ditching.

The project is still early. No director, cast or release date has been announced. That is basically the entire confirmed package right now, so ignore anyone already telling you who is playing Miss T or exactly what the movie will look like. Nobody has announced that yet.

Horror has been chewing through video-game properties at a ridiculous rate lately, but “Scary Teacher” comes from a very different corner than “Resident Evil,” “Silent Hill” or “Five Nights at Freddy’s.” It was built around mobile gameplay, pranks and a deliberately exaggerated villain. That gives the writers freedom, but it also means they have to build an actual movie around a character people mostly know from trying to ruin her day.

The interesting question is how nasty they are willing to make Miss T. Keep her cartoonish and this could skew young. Push the original premise harder and suddenly the story of children trapped around an abusive teacher gets much darker.

For now, the adaptation is officially moving forward. Miss T has escaped the app store.