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NOT SO SCARY: Family Films from Horror Directors!
Written by Dr. Jose
Imagine reading on Twitter tomorrow that Adam Wingard was helping write the next Pixar movie. Or seeing that Robert Eggers was directing a heartwarming family dramedy about an elderly couple. Or that James Wan‘s next project was adapting If You Give a Mouse a Cookie for the big screen. It might be a bit disorienting – these are horror directors, after all. The only time they should be associated with ‘warm fuzzies’ is if they happen to be describing the deadly space creatures from their next movie.
However, it’s actually not that strange for horror directors to dip their toes into family friendly waters, and in fact a lot of the big, established names in horror have done it – multiple times, for some. Perhaps filming blood and guts day in and day out gets boring. Or maybe they shoot softer stuff as a way to decompress. Or maybe – just maybe – they’re simply trying something new.
As for Wingard, Eggers, Wan, and the rest of the new generation of horror directors, they’re all still relatively new and just now making names for themselves. There’s still time for them to give the family stuff a shot – and who knows, sooner or later they just might.
Below I’ve compiled a short list of some of the “softer” works by some of horror’s more talked about directors. Some are familiar, others may surprise you. Have any to add? Leave a comment below!
A decade after writing and directing The Slumber Party Massacre, Amy Jones shifted her focus from driller killers to drooling canines. Along with John Hughes, she wrote the much-beloved ’90s family flick Beethoven. It proved to be quite the success – as of this writing, it has spawned four sequels.
Chuck Russell wrote and directed two of the most memorable horror films of the late-’80s: The Blob and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. His penchant for pun-cracking weird-faced dudes who can defy the laws physics carried over into the early-’90s when he produced and directed the massive hit, The Mask.
Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna, the deranged duo who collectively brought us cult hits like Re-Animator, From Beyond, and Dolls, and who individually brought us films like Society, Return of the Living Dead III, and Castle Freak, joined forces once more to write one of the most successful films of 1989, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. (It beat out Back to the Future II, Ghostbusters II, and even The Little Mermaid.)
Speaking of the Honey franchise, Thom Eberhardt, best known for directing Night of the Comet and the underrated Sole Survivor, wrote the sequel, Honey, I Blew Up the Kid. But the horror connections don’t stop there: HIBUtK was produced by Slumber Party Massacre II writer and director, Deborah Brock, and Empire Pictures president, Albert Band!
Is there anything scarier than a group of feisty senior citizens who want to break out of a retirement home and go on one last adventure before they kick the bucket? Less than a year after writing and directing one of the most successful and influential horror films of all time – Halloween, duh – John Carpenter tried something completely different by writing a few TV movies that were decidedly not horrific: the comedic Zuma Beach and the heartfelt Better Late Than Never.
David Lynch’s films are known for their unsettling subject matter, freaky surrealism, and general bat-shit craziness – which is why it’s so surprising that the director decided to make a G-rated Disney film in the mid-’90s. (That’s not hyperbole, by the way – The Straight Story is literally a G-rated Disney film.) While the film wasn’t a financial success, it was met with critical acclaim, winning 12 awards and 29 nominations – including an Academy Award for Best Actor.
It’s hard to conceive how John D. Hancock, director of Let’s Scare Jessica to Death – one of the great low-budget weirdo spook movies of the ’70s – could also direct one of the many beloved Christmas movies of the ’80s, Prancer. That is, until, you realize the little girl in Prancer is also named Jessica, and then it all makes sense. (I don’t know, I’m grasping at straws here.)
Speaking of Christmas, Bob Clark is probably best known for his two films Black Christmas and A Christmas Story. And while A Christmas Story is a family film to be enjoyed by those of all ages, Clark somehow made an even more family-friendlier film, the talking toddler film Baby Geniuses, which is clearly aimed at…well, actually I don’t know who it’s aimed at. It’s pretty bad.
David Lynch wasn’t the only one on this list to dip his toes into Disney waters – horror maestro Wes Craven was also briefly on Mickey’s payroll when he directed an episode of the TV program Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, entitled “Casebusters”. But perhaps Craven’s best known diversion from the horror genre was his true story drama, Music of the Heart, starring Meryl Streep and Gloria Estefan.
Sometimes you just gotta go where the money is. After writing The Howling and directing The Nest, director Terence Winkless found himself some job security by directing over 40 episodes of The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, as well as their full length feature, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Ninja Quest.
After directing The Gate, Gate 2: The Trespassers, and the underrated I, Madman, Director Tibor Takács also found himself in the TV game: he directed Sabrina the Teenage Witch, which inspired the long-running television show (for which Takács directed the pilot episode). He followed it up by directing the sequel, Sabrina Goes to Rome.
In between writing some of the most fun and popular horror movies of the ’80s – movies like Fright Night, Child’s Play, and Psycho II – Tom Holland tore a page out of the Spielberg/Dante handbook and tried his hand at writing one of those “child in danger” fantasy movies that were becoming so widespread at the time. Despite being well-received, as of this writing, Cloak & Dagger has been Holland’s only attempt at such a genre.
Sadly, the horror community lost one of its greatest and most important figures just a few weeks ago. Herschell Gordon Lewis, the Wizard of Gore himself, passed away in September – and with him went an era of goopy, sleazy, low-budget drive-in B-movie gold that was and is as important to cinema as French New Wave, New Hollywood, or any other cinematic movement over the last century. But it wasn’t all sex and splatter for ol’ H.G. Not long after directing Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs!, Lewis directed two kid’s films: Jimmy, the Boy Wonder and The Magic Land of Mother Goose.
Last but not least, we have Nicolas Roeg, director of the horrifying Don’t Look Now, and the equally-horrifying-but-still-kid-friendly The Witches. If you squint hard enough, you can find a few parallels between the films which makes it seem like not so much of a stretch that Roeg would’ve directed both films. But the graphic sex and violence in Don’t Look Now stands in glaring contrast to the ultimately playful and goofy nature of The Witches.
Honorable mentions: frequent Bob Clark collaborator Alan Ormsby, who wrote Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things, Deranged, Deathdream, and Popcorn, who also happened to helped write Disney’s Mulan. And George A. Romero, who directed the authorized biography, O.J. Simpson: Juice on the Loose. And while it’s not necessarily a family film, it’s pretty damn weird.
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Movies
‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments
It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.
We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.
“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”
That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”
Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:
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Movies
‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening
Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.
Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.
Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.
Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.
Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.
The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.
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News
Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date
Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.
Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.
These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:
According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”
Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.
Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.
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