Skip to main content

Facebook commissions fairy-tale horror series about a handless girl

Facebook commissions fairy-tale horror series about a handless girl

/

The series, Sacred Lies, is based in part on a Brothers Grimm story, and comes from two True Blood writers

Share this story

Facebook has ordered a 10-episode drama series from Blumhouse Television and two of the team members behind HBO’s True Blood. Facebook’s director of development, Ricky Van Veen, made the announcement today at the National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE) conference, Deadline reports.

The working title of the half-hour series is Sacred Lies. The story is based on the Brothers Grimm fairy tale The Handless Maiden and the Stephanie Oaks novel The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly. The series’s plot sounds significantly darker and stranger than much of the content in Facebook’s Watch tab, which tends to favor gimmicky reality shows and clips from popular internet creators. It’s about “a handless teen who escapes from a cult and finds herself in juvenile detention, suspected of knowing who killed her cult leader,” according to Deadline.

Sacred Lies reunites two of the people behind True Blood: writer Scott Winant and writer / executive producer Raelle Tucker. It’s being produced by the television arm of Blumhouse Productions, the horror-inflected company behind movies like Get Out, M. Night Shyamalan’s Split, and the Purge and Paranormal Activity movies. Although Facebook plans to let anyone publish to the Watch tab eventually, it’s currently competing for viewers with more established streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. A series like this could be a step toward commissioning its own wave of prestige programming.

Facebook has said it plans to spend more than $1 billion on original programming in the upcoming year, so details about its 2018 lineup will probably keep coming.

The Verge has reached out to Facebook and will update with any new information.