This was the week horror spent arguing with its own paperwork. Not with monsters, not with box office, with rights and contracts and the versions of films that somebody upstairs decided you were not going to see. Two studios are now racing each other to make a Nightmare on Elm Street movie neither one fully owns. A director got his cut back eighteen years after a studio sanded it down. A screenplay that died in 1999 got put on the table and opened up.
The through line, if you want one, is unfinished business. Horror has an enormous amount of it, and this week it all came due at once.
Two Studios, One Glove, and Nobody Wants to Blink
Last month Paramount announced a new Nightmare on Elm Street film under its genre label Paramount Primal, having acquired the U.S. rights to adapt Wes Craven’s original screenplay. Then reports emerged that Warner Bros. is developing a competing Elm Street project of its own, with Lee Cronin of Evil Dead Rise linked to the film. The reason both can be circling at once is the reason nothing has happened for sixteen years. Paramount holds the domestic rights, Warner Bros. holds international, and neither will let go. Paramount Primal has the producers of Weapons, Barbarian and Companion, J.D. Lifshitz and Raphael Margules.
Paramount also has the thing that money cannot buy, which is the Cravens. Wes Craven’s widow and son own the U.S. rights and have publicly blessed the Primal project, with both attached as producers. Warner reportedly tried for that endorsement and the negotiations fell apart. So one studio has a well liked director circling and one has the family, and horror fans are being asked to pick a side in a rights dispute that neither of them started. I have no idea which film will be better, or whether both get made at all. I do know that the last time somebody made an Elm Street movie without asking the people who loved the first one, we got 2010.
Chris Carter Was Told to Make It Less Scary
The X-Files: I Want to Believe arrives on Hulu and Disney+ on August 14 in an R-rated director’s cut with a new subtitle, Vrach Frankenshteyn, which translates from Russian as Doctor Frankenstein. Carter’s account is that he made the film too frightening and Fox wanted a PG-13, and the material that got softened was the Frankenstein thread the new subtitle is named after. The restored version puts the violence and the surgical horror back where he had them.
Here is what makes this more than a curiosity. The 2008 film has spent eighteen years carrying a reputation for being too quiet and not scary enough. A horror movie that gets de-escalated to protect a rating will feel restrained, because it was made restrained on purpose by people who were not the director. That does not mean the cut fixes the film, and the new version has not been released publicly yet. It means the complaint and the confession finally line up, which almost never happens in public. The timing is not innocent either, with Hulu developing an X-Files pilot from Ryan Coogler. Disney is tidying the shelf before company arrives.
The Further Stopped Being a Place You Visit
Sony’s final trailer for Insidious: Out of the Further landed this week ahead of an August 21 theatrical release, and it flips the premise the franchise has run on for five films. Gemma, played by Amelia Eve, discovers she can enter the Further. Then she discovers she can bring things back out. Lin Shaye returns as Elise, doing what she has done since 2010, which is explain to somebody what they have actually done.
Every previous film treated the crossing as a cost. You go over, something follows you home, and it is singular and personal and yours. Making that trip repeatable turns a haunting into a logistics problem, and turns Gemma from a person into a door. That is a genuinely good idea for a sixth entry, which is not a sentence I expected to write. Whether it holds up for ninety minutes is another matter, but at least the premise is structural rather than another family and another attic.
Romero Had Resident Evil and Hollywood Took It Away
Our Morgue Files column opened the case on George A. Romero’s unproduced Resident Evil, and the details are worse than the legend. He was hired in 1998, given roughly six weeks, and delivered a draft dated October 7 of that year. Constantin Film kept declining to commit through 1999 until he was simply gone. Capcom producer Yoshiki Okamoto later summarized it in one line: his script was not good, so Romero was fired. Company head Bernd Eichinger’s actual objection appears to have been the gore, which risked ratings that would have kept the film out of ordinary German cinemas.
The draft itself moves Raccoon City to Pennsylvania, turns the Spencer Mansion into a bootlegger’s house so the secret passages have a reason to exist, and makes Chris Redfield a rancher who grew up playing there. It also contains armored Hunters, a man eating plant, and zombie dogs, horses, crows, monkeys and sharks, which is roughly the point where a line producer stops enjoying his afternoon. It still reads like a script that could have used further development, though it was not literally Romero’s first pass. The surviving archive holds three closely spaced drafts, with the October 7 revision apparently the version handed over. What it got instead was Paul W. S. Anderson, and the man who wrote the physics of the entire genre never made a zombie video game movie. That one still stings.
The Freddy Makeup Nobody Credited Correctly
The best thing in our interview with effects veteran Jeff Farley is a decades-old misattribution. By Farley’s firsthand account, the Freddy makeup in the boiler room sequences of Freddy’s Dead was sculpted by Chris Robbins at John Carl Buechler’s shop rather than by David Miller, who is separately credited with creating Freddy’s makeup. In dailies, Bob Shaye reportedly praised how good David Miller’s makeup looked in those scenes, and somebody had to correct him. Farley reads that as a win, since it meant New Line was watching closely.
He is being generous. The best week of Buechler’s shop began with a studio head getting the name wrong, and that is the practical effects business in miniature. The rest of the conversation is a tour through work nobody sees: a monster paw built for The Serpent and the Rainbow that got written out of the script after it was finished, a worm covered Freddy puppet head that never made the cut, a Gingerdead Man hand puppet abandoned because the production would not pay for materials to finish the molds. Forty years of that, and Farley’s accessible archive is one photograph in a Full Moon book. Practical effects people are the only crew members whose greatest hits include the things you never saw.
Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man opens wide today, and we talked to Karen Cliche, who plays Alison opposite Roth as her husband Marty. The last time the two worked together was Thanksgiving, which put her in an oven, so she is calling this one an upgrade. She describes a fast, improvisation heavy set, a director who wants the cast to win, and a film she knew going in would be a full on assault of gore.
The part worth watching is the money. Ice Cream Man was produced under Roth’s Horror Section banner, the genre label he launched with Media Capital Technologies, which includes a mechanism for fans to buy an equity stake in the company itself. Cliche’s enthusiasm for it is not about returns, it is about investment in the other sense, fans feeling like part of the thing. Horror fans already behave like stakeholders, tracking directors across decades and arguing about which shop did which effect. Whether formal ownership turns that into something that lasts is a question nobody can answer yet. Check back in three years.
At Fantasia, The Last Footage had its world premiere, and its hook is a real technical swing. Writer, director and star Arkar Soe Oo shot the entire film through 4K smart glasses worn by the characters, set in Myanmar, following friends into the cursed Wingabar Forest near an inherited rubber plantation. Our review credits the originality and the creature design and then documents the cost: shakier footage than the genre has trained people to tolerate, a sound mix where screams bury the dialogue, and deaths staged just outside the frame in a way that reads as budget rather than restraint. It scored 1.5 out of 5.
I want to be careful how I put this, because a low score on an ambitious film is not the same as a low score on a lazy one. Found footage survives by finding the next plausible camera, and wearable glasses are obviously the next plausible camera. Somebody had to go first and get the shakiness wrong so the next filmmaker can get it right. Bowels of Hell also had its North American premiere at the festival this week, and we covered that too.
And If You Just Want Something On
Three streaming pieces went up this week for people who would rather watch than read about rights disputes: eighteen fan favorite horror movies currently on Netflix, ten Summerween picks for bringing October energy into a month that does not deserve it, and a consumer report on what actually survived the horror mystery box crash. We also talked to Rob Hollocks about building a cult out of grief and land in The Observance.
What’s Coming
Ice Cream Man is in theaters today. The X-Files: I Want to Believe, Vrach Frankenshteyn hits Hulu and Disney+ on August 14. Insidious: Out of the Further opens August 21 with tickets already on sale. That is three weekends in a row with something to argue about, and one of them is a movie that has been sitting in a vault since 2008.
So which one are you actually going to make time for? I want to know specifically whether anyone is planning to sit down with the restored X-Files, because I suspect the people most curious about that cut are the same people who spent 2008 complaining about the one we got.