After years of being stuck in development hell, the movie version of the popular novel by Seth Grahame-Smith Pride and Prejudice and Zombies has finally started rolling, and we now have our first image from the movie, featuring the women from Jane Austen’s most famous book. The photo shows Elizabeth (Lily James), Lydia (Ellie Bamber), Mary (Millie Brady), Jane (Bella Heathcote), and Kitty (Suki Waterhouse) wearing their corsets and wielding their zombie killin’ swords.

The movie’s development has been a complicated one. David O. Russell wrote a script and was set to direct it himself, but his version of the project eventually fell through. The movie was revived again with Fright Night’s Craig Gillespie, but he left the project before production began as well, making the movie seem cursed. Finally Burr Steers (Igby Goes Down) came on board and rewrote the script with “an eye toward realism,” and now the movie is finally set to be released next year.

The original novel came out back in 2009 and was an instant hit. Set in an alternate world where a zombie infestation has been raging for some seventy years, the undead intersect with the plot of Jane Austen’s classic novel. Seth Grahame Smith’s second novel Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter has already been made into a movie, and the results were less than stellar. Hopefully the producers of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies have a better time at nailing the tone of that movie than the makers of Abraham Lincoln did.

HT [Entertainment Weekly]