Prior to Aquaman, director James Wan built his reputation on a sequence of hit horror movies: Saw, Insidious and The Conjuring were all made under his direction, before he took on action movie Furious 7 and then DC's latest and biggest hit.

Not that Wan left horror entirely — his The Conjuring 2 released in between Furious 7 and Aquaman, while he wrote The Nun, 2019's new Annabelle movie, and is involved with Stephen King project The Tommyknockers — but he could be taking the Aquaman mythos that way should the right script emerge.

Named after the monstrous horde that emerged from the ruins of a sunken Atlantis, The Trench is being sketched out by a pair of new screenwriters, Noah Gardner and Aidan Fitzgerald, according to The Hollywood Reporter (and supported by Deadline and TheWrap.)

The Trench were introduced in Aquaman but were not its main focus, and this spin-off would do the inverse, zeroing in upon them without needing characters from the Aquaman films to keep it afloat.

Gardner and Fitzgerald both worked as production assistants at JJ Abrams' company, Bad Robot.

Read also: 'Aquaman' again makes waves to stay atop North American box office

It might seem like a leftfield move, given the bright new direction that Aquaman lent the DC Extended Universe, but a pivot to the horror genre is already in motion at Sony, which oversees Marvel's X-Men franchise; The New Mutants is due August 2019, proposing a much scarier take on the traditional training academy set-up.

Aquaman has now made US$1.1 billion at the worldwide box office, meaning that it is Warner Bros' biggest DC Comics adaptation, more than even Batman triumph The Dark Knight Rises.

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