Ever since Amelie sent her father’s pointy-hatted companion on an impromptu tour of the world’s top monuments, the film industry has been enamored with garden gnomes. So while some like to cast the ceramic cherubs in adaptations of William Shakespeare tragedies, others want to turn them into horror-movie threats.

Enter How to Survive a Garden Gnome Attack, a planned adaptation of Chuck Sambuchino’s unique survival guide that has been optioned by Sony and produced by Robert Zemeckis. Deadline now reports that Chad Damiani and JP Lavin have been hired to bang out a script for a live-action story about humans preparing for a garden gnome invasion (the gnomes will be animated, according to the site). The plan is to push the envelope on a PG-13 rating, making the rosy cheeked gnomes in the picture a legitimate threat.

I can see that. Even in the recent animated feature Gnomeo & Juliet, there was something unnerving about the pint-sized, tiny-handed protagonists. At the time, I chalked it up to the film’s heavy-handed reliance on Sir Elton John’s musical catalogue. But there’s just no getting around the fact that garden gnomes are weird, and if they did decide to rise up and attack us, I’d likely be a puddle of nerves lying useless on the floor.

As for Gnome Attack, Deadline says that Zemeckis is eyeing the project as a potential directing vehicle. Currently, he’s hard at work on Flight, a character drama starring Denzel Washington about a pilot who helps land a commercial airline when things go wrong midflight. But he could leap to Gnome right after, if Damiani and Lavin’s script is solid.