Italy’s road to the 99th Academy Awards now runs straight through Hollywood.

New Line Cinema has won a competitive bid for the remake rights to Paolo Strippoli’s psychological horror thriller The Spiral – the Italian title is L’estranea - which is Italy’s Oscar entry for International Film this year (the shortlist will be announce on December 15). The deal includes rights to develop a feature-length English-language motion picture based on the original and also includes distribution in the U.S., Canada, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam. New Line will give the Italian-language film a limited theatrical release before the end of the year in time for Oscar season. The studio is home to American horror franchises such as The Conjuring and It, so the deal is a remarkable endorsement for a young Italian genre director.

The news came right after Strippoli’s visit to New York, where the film’s Oscar campaign began.

On November 10, The Spiral was screened for the press in Manhattan - an event organized by Italy On Screen Today festival - followed the next day by a meeting between the Director and the journalists at the Consulate General of Italy on Park Avenue, at the presence of the Consul General Giuseppe Pastorelli. “Our goal is to go as far as possible, hoping the film will be recognized, seen and voted for,” Strippoli said. “Being here to promote Italian cinema with this film is an enormous honor.” He described the movie as deeply rooted in Italy’s film tradition but also mixed with genre, “which in Italy is very often undervalued.” He wants it to be in conversation with the cinema being made internationally, “including here in America.” In Italy, he added, “it often seems we live in a small, closed ecosystem. Instead, the strength of any national cinema is variety.”

The film premiered in Competition at the Venice Film Festival, and it stars Jasmine Trinca, Romana Maggiora Vergano, Adriano Giannini and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. It tells the story of a mother who wants to fix a family tragedy only ending up with even more tragedies. In Italy, it has spent weeks in the box office top ten. “It’s a success we didn’t expect,” Strippoli admitted. Getting there was a long road.

The film took five years to reach the set, and “a lot of doors were slammed in our faces.” At its heart, he explained, the film is about control and the need to keep everything in life under control. “There is the realization that free will exists only up to a certain point. That terrifies me,” he said. “Life is made of chaos. It frightens me not to know what will happen when I walk out of the Consulate tonight.” His protagonist “would rather take the blame for anything that happens to her than accept that it simply happened.” The result is “a clash between two visions of life,” between a mother and a daughter and between generations. “My fear is being like Anna,” he confessed, “because I know I am like Anna.”

Bringing the cast together was not easy. Strippoli said Trinca was reluctant at first, because she wasn’t convinced about making a horror film, and he had to win her over. Bruni Tedeschi was the opposite: after reading the part, she told him, “I have my own estranea too.” The film’s references are as layered as its genre. Strippoli cited Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, the Faust myth and Greek tragedy: “We wrote the character of the stranger thinking of her as the chorus of a Greek tragedy.” The Director grew up on Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento, and he regrets that the Italian horror tradition “was interrupted at the industrial level” for some 30 years. Meanwhile, he noted, the genre changed abroad. He praised the “splendid new wave” of American genre filmmaking and said a dialogue with figures in the U.S. industry had already begun.

The New Line deal is a sign that the conversation is bearing fruit.