The buzz on Mikael Hafstrom’s 1408 is fantastic so far. It opens this weekend against some pretty stiff competition, so it’ll be interesting to see if great reviews and great trailers will be enough to get audiences to see it over Evan Almighty. Whether or not audiences will be interested is anyone’s guess, but what’s certain is that 1408 has gotten Hollywood interested in Mikael Hafstrom.
Hafstrom has a pretty solid career going for him over in Europe before coming to Hollywood. He’s done two English speaking movie so far, Derailed and 1408, but before that he did three award winning Swedish language films. In an interview over at SciFi Wire Hafstrom revealed that his two Swedish movies may soon be remade for American audiences.
In particular he mentions two movies called Drowning Ghost and Evil as being up for remakes. Drowning Ghost or Strandvaskaren in Sweden, is a horror thriller about the slaughter of students at a boarding school. Evil (Ondskan) is yet another boarding school setting, this time a drama about a boy who wants to be left alone, expelled from school for fighting and forced to attend a private boarding school. Ondskan in particular interests me, more than just a story about some boy, it’s billed as an examination of the psychology of cruelty among kids.
Unfortunately, it won’t be Mikael Hafstrom doing the remaking. He says, “I don't know if there's much that can be added to what I did, so I don't really want to do it again.”
