B-movie legend Roger Corman is a prolific director with more than 50 titles to his credit. Among his movies, like 1960's Little Shop of Horrors and 1963's The Terror (both which featured a young Jack Nicholson), he's made eight features based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Clearly, a fan of the macabre author's disturbing stories, Corman is looking to revisit House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, Premature Burial, Tales of Terror, The Raven, The Haunted Palace, The Masque of the Red Death, and The Tomb of Ligeia through a string of remakes.
Corman shared his enthusiasm for the ambitious endeavor with THR, telling the magazine:
“Now being able to do them in 3D and with a lot of computer graphics, we can do things we never dreamed of doing before.”
As someone who feels horror as a genre lends itself well to 3D, I must admit I'm eager to see what Corman has in mind for the device. However, Corman hasn't helmed a feature since 1990's Frankenstein Unbound, and has no plans to return to the director's chair. Instead, he'll produce these pics, starting with House of Usher in 2013. From there, Corman plans to make two a year, each for as little as $2-2.5 million dollars. This means by the time the final feature in this series is released, Corman will be 91 years old, and have nearly 410 producer credits to his name. On average, that means he has produced about 6.5 films a year since his first in 1955.
Produced and financed through Corman’s New Horizons Productions, each of the Poe adaptations will get a brief theatrical run in the U.S. and will have foreign distribution rights for sale at the American Film Market. For now, Corman is seeking a modern-day Vincent Price to be his star, hinting he's looking to TV for a fifty-something performer with Price's level of “sensitivity and neuroticism."
