The other day Fango brought you screenwriter Drew McWeeny’s comments on the RACE WITH THE DEVIL remake he’s scripting with partner Scott Swan. The duo got the job on the basis of their work on DREAD, which they scripted for 20th Century Fox based on Clive Barker’s story. So what’s the status of that project? “20th Century Fox still owns it,” McWeeny reports. “Clive was completely behind us and I couldn’t have had a better experience with him, so we’ll see if Fox eventually comes back to it. There’s a director attached who has a very different vision of the picture than we do, but we’ll see.” That filmmaker is Eduardo Rodriguez, whose occult thriller CURANDERO is still awaiting release from Dimension. Although he doesn’t see eye to eye with Rodriguez, McWeeny diplomatically says, “Look, I wish him well. If he has his vision of DREAD, that’s fine.”
But getting into it a bit more, he reveals, “The thing I’ve always responded to about the story is that it’s not supernatural; it’s one of the few short stories from Clive that has none of those overtones. It’s about the shit that we carry inside ourselves, and if Eduardo is going to try and latch an Asian horror vibe with creepy dead girls onto it, that’s his thing. I believe it’s a mistake; we wrote the draft we wanted to. I know it has been two years since Eduardo’s been trying to get his made; he hasn’t found a writer yet, and a big part of that is because the material is so strong that it feels almost sacrilegious to graft something else on top of it.”
Despite this, McWeeny would still like to see a faithful adaptation of the original tale reach the screen someday. “I hope that either he or Fox eventually come back around to the short story. But it’s their material, and sooner or later they’ll want to do something with it.”
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