Good day, frolickers in all things dripping. It’s time for another brain-cringing trip through the latest in horror’s more noteworthy atrocities. Our genre is generally free from rumors, and also free from budgets and mainstream attention, so I guess there’s a tradeoff. That said, this week actually has a couple of premature news items of note, so I guess these times, they are a-changin’. Or whatever.
One of those involves microbudget mastermind Jason Blum putting it out there that the script for Sinister 2, written by Scott Derrickson and Robert Cargill, has been completed and is technically set for a summer 2015 release, and that he wants Derrickson back to direct. But who knows if that’ll happen.
What we do know is that the awesome sauce that was the Israeli darkly comedic thriller Big Bad Wolves is getting a Blu-ray/DVD release on April 22 from Magnolia Home Entertainment, which includes at least a couple of making-of featurettes. Plus, we’ve got St. Patrick’s Day coming, and WWE Studios is going to celebrate by debuting a trailer for Leprechaun: Origins on Monday. So, there’s that. Here’s WWE’s Hornswoggle giving the world that news.
Now, on with this week's column!
In Fear Director Could Possibly Direct The Changeling Remake
Horror is obviously no stranger to endless remakes, but it’s rare when the genuine classics get tapped for updates. NBC is bringing Rosemary’s Baby back for a miniseries, and Peter Medak’s legendary 1980 haunted house flick The Changeling has had a remake screenplay floating around for a while, but the latest comes from British filmmaker Jeremy Lovering, who directed the recently released thriller In Fear, which also mostly utilizes a single setting to evoke terror. Talking about it with Fangoria, he gave his point-of-view in bringing this tale back to today’s audiences.
"I’m really nervous about it, for obvious reasons. The original is an extraordinarily good film, and I’ve tried to take a kind of alternative point of view – doing the scenes you don’t see, the ones in between those that are in the film…It’s the same producers [as the original] who want to make it, and it has been a very interesting process, but I’m still trying to decide whether it’s the right thing to do or not."
I’m not at all a fan of this remake happening, but he sounds like he’s coming at it with the right amount of trepidation. Bravado never fares well when it comes to haunted houses, as those are the folks that get caught up first.
Kickstart Feature Length Claymation Horror Spook Train 3D
Claymation filmmaker Lee Hardcastle first made his name with a 60-second Evil Dead clip, and then won a contest to make his way into the anthology film The ABCs of Death in 2012 with the short T is for Toilet. It isn’t often that claymation artists get such wide acclaim, so it’s especially awesome that his next project sounds this badass. He took to Kickstarter to promote Spook Train, a faux trailer for a finished product that he hopes campaign donors will fund. And every reward will come with Ghost Burger, the 22-minute sequel to his T is for Toilet short. Ba-zing!
The hook to this project, as you can see in the video above, is a group of kids stumping upon a legendary carnival attraction that was closed down due to its horrific past, and the film will work as an anthology of ten different stories that take place in each of the haunted house’s rooms. Not only is the bizarro-twisted sense of humor on point, but the clay work itself is cleverly gory, fluid, and as effective as one could possibly hope for. If this project doesn’t get funded, I’m going to start my own so people will pay me to smack around everyone else who didn’t donate. Here’s a trailer for Ghost Burger, just in case you weren’t sated by the video above.
Der Samurai (2014) English-subbed Trailer - The best video clips are here
German Thriller Der Samurai Debuts Unsettling New Trailer and Poster
Rarely does a trailer leave me more confused than I was when I started watching, but German director Till Kleinert has left me perplexed with the new trailer for his upcoming thriller Der Samurai, which looks like the fairy tale ravings of a madman. Not only is there a violence-hungry man (Pit Bukowski) in a dress carrying a huge sword, but it all starts off with a big bag of meat. It’s not the worst way to grab my attention.
The samurai in question stalks the woods around a small village in rural East Germany, waiting to attack, though someone is apparently intent on keeping him away. A cop named Jakob (Michel Diercks) is on the case, but his intentions are diverted once he meets the samurai and becomes enamored by him. And then weird stuff happens. You’ll be able to see this one when it premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City this April. Just be careful probably. Here’s the extremely long poster.
Proxy Trailer Makes Grief and Loss Terrifying
At some point, Brian De Palma stopped making interesting tawdry thrillers and just let himself go into the shadows of his former self. I almost wish Proxy was a De Palma movie, because the duplicitous nature of everything looks right up his winding alley. But no, this is from director Zack Parker and his screenwriter partner Kevin Donner, and looks far more disturbing than anything that’s come out fairly recently, without the abundance of blood-soaked gore than lesser talents might have heaped onto it.
Proxy follows Esther Woodhouse, whose pregnancy was brought to a brutal halt after she was beaten on her way home one day. She finds a support group for parents with dead children, and she becomes good friends with a woman named Melanie (Alexa Havins), who at first seems to be the best gift that grief could ever provide, but it all goes south fairly quickly. And keeps going in different directions, at least as far as festival audiences have been saying since it premiered last fall. U.S. audiences can find it during its limited theatrical run starting April 18, which will soon be followed by VOD and DVD releases.
Trailers for Mischief Night and The Borderlands Do What They’re Supposed To
There were two more trailers that seemed just interesting enough to show you guys, but not interesting enough to give their own segments. (Shots fired!) The first is Travis Baker’s throwback slasher Mischief Night, which you can see above. It involves a babysitting teenager falling victim to a masked killer, only there’s a strange cat-and-mouse game between the girl and the killer. It’s cool, right?
And next up, we have the found footage faux documentary The Borderlands from writer/director Elliot Goldner. It centers on a bunch of investigators who are in the Vatican to look into a group of weird occurrences at a remote church. It looks like the usual round of hollering while running in circles, but with enjoyable accents that make it all worth it. It doesn’t have a domestic release date yet but U.K. audiences can find it this August.
