Sam Raimi, who founded Ghost House Pictures, told reporters that his company's adaptation of "The Monkey's Paw" is still in early development. In W.W. Jacobs' 1902 short story, a monkey's paw grants wishes with horrific consequences.

"The Monkey's Paw is a script that's being written over at Ghost House pictures," Raimi said in a group interview on Monday in Beverly Hills, Calif., where he was promoting his film Drag Me to Hell. The screenwriters are David Kajganich and Tom McAlister.

As a founding producer at Ghost House, Raimi is waiting to see the script before getting involved with the film. "I'm not actively involved in it," he said. "If they get the script to a finished state, they would show it to me. I'd read it and give them notes. They would probably do another draft, and if it was of a level of quality that I thought people could really like, at that point I would try and take it around and see if I could get a director interested. That's still a long way away, basically."

Even in shepherding the potential film, Raimi would still let another director take the helm. "Once a director would be interested, I'd let him work with the writer and see where he wanted to develop it, and only then could I really look at it and say, 'OK, I think it's really good, and we should bring it around to the studios and see if it could get financing' or 'I don't think this is going to work. It doesn't work for me. You can have this script and maybe run with it yourself, but it's not right for a Ghost House picture.'"