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‘Terrifier’ Director Damien Leone Would Like to Remake ‘Friday the 13th’
If you are an up-and-coming director, it’s not always the best idea to reboot a cherished franchise, especially if you only have a few films under your belt. But if those films are pretty much homages to the source material you are trying to revive, it could be a perfect match.
That’s what Terrifier and Terrifier 2 director Damien Leone would like to do with the Friday the 13th franchise. This series has been around for over 40 years and its fanbase is pretty picky when it comes to adding to it. They might be even more staunch than say Star Wars or Marvel fans. Some in those fan groups find it hard to embrace diversity let alone the thought of a reboot.
However, Leone is a fan, he tells Slash Film in an interview, and he has been for a very long time. Even though he doesn’t have an official pitch yet, he definitely has some ideas.
“I’ve been on record for quite some time now saying if I could ever remake one slasher film, it would be ‘Friday the 13th,'” he said. “Jason was always my favorite slasher since I was a little kid, and I think that there’s a way to … I mean, my approach would be to keep it in the ’80s, honestly. I would have it take place in the early ’80s. I would try and make him as scary as possible because I feel like that’s something they kind of lost as the movies went along. You just start getting too comfortable with these villains and you need to be scared of them again.”
Leone has created one such villain; his very own Art the Clown, the sadist mime in his Terrifier series. Fans might agree with his statement about making Jason scary again because they shelled out over $15 million to see Terrifier 2 last Halloween. That film is even getting a theatrical re-release next month. Leone says in the interview that he has spoken to industry peeps about his ideas on a Friday reboot, but, “I think I’m still a little too obscure on that Hollywood list of people that they would approach to direct that film.”
He shouldn’t sell himself short. David F. Sandberg wasn’t that well known before he landed a franchise grail. He directed Annabelle: Creation before going on to direct both Shazam! movies. And director Marcus Nispel wasn’t a household name when he got the job rebooting Texas Chainsaw Massacre or an actual Friday the 13th remake in 2009.
The Friday the 13th franchise is a hot property indeed; that cannot be denied. It could probably be made for a few million dollars but has the potential to make hundreds more. The only thing stopping any studio from getting their hands on it is an ongoing IP lawsuit over who owns which killer Voorhees. But, if Leone did a direct remake he wouldn’t even need one of them.
Leone adds: “I’ve been told, ‘Listen, everybody and their mother wants to make that movie. It’s a long list.’ So unfortunately, I don’t think I’d get to make it now, but maybe when they reboot it in the next 20 years, I’ll be able to take a crack at it. But that would be a dream project and so would ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street.’ […] I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff and scary stuff you can do with Freddy that we haven’t seen in a long time. The hard thing about ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ is just finding that new Robert Englund. That would be the hardest thing, of course.”
For people who can’t wait to travel back to Camp Crystal Lake, a Peacock series is in development which is a prequel to Friday the 13th.
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‘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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‘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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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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