David Fincher takes on Holmes! The first serial killer in the U.S?

by Matt Holmes

Eric Roth, the screenwriter who adapted F. Scott Fitzgerald's THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON for director David Fincher tells Coming Soon that he loved what Fincher did with the serial killer movie ZODIAC so much that he is trying his best to get him attached to his latest screenplay. That being THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY, Roth's script about the first serial killer in the U.S. based on Erik Larson's New York Times Best Seller...

"Fincher's actually interested in it," said Roth, "I want to do a whole thing showing how skyscrapers were built. I love the fact that, in Chicago, there's no low ground to put skyscrapers in. There's just water. They do this special thing where they actually squash -- I don't know how to describe it. But I want to show that like he did in "Zodiac" with the Transamerica building going up. That kind of thing."
The novel focuses on the World Columbian Exposition of 1893 where one of the main characters is H.H. Holmes, the first documented serial killer in America. Another is Daniel Burnham, the architecut and mastermind of the exposition. Wiki says... Holmes would use the fair to lure his victims to their death. Dr. Holmes had built his "World's Fair Hotel" complete with a gas chamber, dissection table and a crematorium to dispose of the bodies. Holmes would remove the skeletons of his victims and sell them for medical and scientific study. After ZODIAC and SE7EN, does Fincher still have something left to say about serial killers?

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Matt Holmes is the co-founder of What Culture, formerly known as Obsessed With Film. He has been blogging about pop culture and entertainment since 2006 and has written over 10,000 articles.