Jack Chick’s Dark Dungeons is possibly the most famous tract said conspiracy theorist/evangelical Christian/outsider artist has ever produced.
And now it might be getting an official film adaptation.
For those unfamiliar, Dark Dungeons essentially argues that playing D&D will eventually turn you into an actual wizard, before you wind up enslaved to a demon and forced to do his bidding and/or kill yourself before you find Jesus. Essentially it’s the Reefer Madness of the tabletop gaming crowd, a hilarious misinterpretation of just about everything D&D fans actually do, made even funnier by the fact that Chick was far from alone in his beliefs about what a bunch of dice and graph paper could actually do to impressionable young minds.
JR Ralls, a middle manager in Portland, is running, what else, a Kickstarter to make this movie a reality, and yes, it’s an authorized adaptation. It started when Ralls hit the lottery and won $1000:
I decided I wanted to spend it to bring something that would last; I would spend it to try and bring Jack Chick’s epic 1984 graphic novel / tract to film.
I wrote Chick Publications explaining this to them and I’m super-excited to announce that I have obtained the video rights to make a movie based on Dark Dungeons.
Interestingly, Ralls claims that Chick won’t be receiving any funding from this movie, which raises the question of what, particularly, he’s getting out of this. Maybe just job satisfaction?
Either way, we’ll be genuinely curious to see how this comes together. The Kickstarter is just $3000 away from its $12,000 goal, so it’ll likely get the funding it needs to make this happen. We just hope the Dead Alewives are somehow involved.