News
Lights Out Director Shares Original Script Treatment with Alternate Ending
All things considered, 2016 has been a pretty good year for theatrical horror. The Witch delighted fans of slow burn psychological horror, while films like The Shallows reinvigorated the survival horror sub-genre. The Conjuring 2 managed to be a sequel almost as good as the terrifying original, and The Purge: Election Year was perhaps the series’ best entry to date. Another big success both critically and financially this year was Lights Out.
Based on a terrific short film that went viral a few years back, Lights Out was expanded to feature length by director David F. Sandberg, who wrote and directed the original short. While Sandberg didn’t ultimately get final script credit for the feature – that went to Final Destination 5 scribe Eric Heisserer – Sandberg did write up the original treatment for the movie. The majority of Sandberg’s plot was retained in the final draft, but one thing that was notably altered was the ending.
In the final film, mentally troubled mom Sophie (Maria Bello) commits suicide in order to save her family from the demonic spirit of Diana, whose existence is directly tied to Sophie’s. This upset many people when the movie first came out, as some interpreted the ending as a message that those with mental illness would be better off killing themselves. At the time, Sandberg pushed back against that reading of the ending, and insisted that his original version was different.
Now fans can find out and judge for themselves, as Sandberg recently took to Twitter to release his original treatment for Lights Out. Here’s the tweet in question:
For the curious, here's the original treatment I wrote for Lights Out. A lot changed but a lot also stayed the same: https://t.co/XA2liuxegQ pic.twitter.com/Q4VNce9hiP
— David F. Sandberg (@ponysmasher) November 9, 2016
For those seeking the TL;DR version of what’s different about the ending, in Sandberg’s treatment, Sophie is instead mistakenly killed a police officer, and it’s heavily implied that her young son Martin has now absorbed the curse of Diana. The full text is very much worth reading though, for any curious fans.
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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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