Vera Farmiga Leads Occult Detective Horror ‘Inferno’

Scotland Yard’s occult unit is a rumor rather than a matter of record, and Inferno is a film built on taking the rumor seriously. Vera Farmiga will star as the former detective who gets pulled back inside it. Variety broke the news on Monday.

Bryan Hill wrote the script and will direct, and Farmiga is attached to executive produce as well as lead. Farmiga plays a former detective whose hunt for a killer draws her back into the Black Branch , the division she had walked away from, and onto the trail of a paranormal terror she believed was behind her as well.

What the Black Branch Is The Black Branch is drawn from a long-rumored secret unit inside Scotland Yard, said to take the cases with an occult element to them. It is rumor rather than documented police history, and Hill is using it as the premise of the film. Manifest Pictures Takes It to Buyers at AFM Manifest Pictures is handling international sales and will present Inferno to buyers at the American Film Market, while CAA Media Finance and UTA Independent Film Group co-represent domestic rights.

Ara Keshishian and Petr Jákl are producing for ZQ Entertainment alongside Adrian Askarieh of Prime Universe Films, whose credits include the Hitman films. Production is scheduled to begin in late spring. Manifest co-CEO Zach Glueck has pointed to Manhunter , The Exorcist and Longlegs as reference points for the film, and said the company was “immediately sucked into Hill’s script.” Hill put his own aim more broadly in a statement: “Great horror films challenge what we believe about the world.” Hill comes to the film from comics and television, having written Batman and the Outsiders and American Carnage on the page and episodes of Titans for screen.

He also has a feature in post-production, Archangel . Farmiga Is Coming Off the Warrens’ Last Case Farmiga played Lorraine Warren across the Conjuring films, finishing with 2025’s The Conjuring: Last Rites , which closed the book on her and Patrick Wilson’s Ed and Lorraine. The franchise is going on without them, with Garrett Wareing and Amanda Fix playing younger versions of the couple in the 2027 prequel The Conjuring: First Communion and a series in the works at HBO Max .

Her genre record runs well past the Warrens, though. She spent five seasons as Norma Bates on Bates Motel , played the adoptive mother in Orphan and the mother in Joshua , and she is an Academy Award nominee for Up in the Air . Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga in The Conjuring .

The title carries some genre history of its own. Dario Argento made an Inferno in 1980, the middle film of his Three Mothers trilogy, sitting between Suspiria and Mother of Tears .