Veteran genre director Wes Craven, coming off the success of his airborne thriller RED EYE and currently working on the revamping of his classic THE HILLS HAVE EYES, has a number of irons in the fire, and confirms that one is another redux of a film he wrote and directed. “We’re talking about doing a remake of LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT,” Craven tells Fango. “[Original producer] Sean Cunningham called me up and said, ‘What about it?’ So who knows? I’d find somebody [else] to direct it; I don’t feel comfortable about repeating films that I’ve done, but it’s interesting having a young director come in and do something different. Alexandre Aja really took an interesting direction on the remake of THE HILLS HAVE EYES; I believe it’s going to be really good. I’d also supervise the script for LAST HOUSE, but at a certain point it’s best to step back and let the director make his movie.”
Craven is happy enough about how HILLS is going, in fact, that he’s brought Aja on board another film he’s producing, the supernatural chiller THE WAITING. “Alex is going to direct that; he’s a great director and is very interested in it, so that is going to be going relatively shortly, I would say sometime early next year,” says Craven of the Gold Circle project, which one assumes will get a title change following Lions Gate’s recent release of the comedy WAITING…. “It’s about a husband trying to help his wife get over the death of their child, a small boy. She’s completely distraught, so he decides they should relocate, and they move into a beautiful house in the suburbs. She begins to think that her son is there with them because of little things that happen—like she has kept his favorite teddy bear, and she turns around and it has moved to the other side. Turns out it’s not him at all, but a ghost that’s haunting the house. It should be filmed in a place that looks like the U.S., but it’ll probably reduce the budget to shoot in Toronto or someplace like that.”
Meanwhile, rumors persist regarding a fourth entry in the SCREAM franchise. Dark Horizons now confirms that Craven will most likely have little to do with any further installments. The director reveals to Ecran Large that he was “totally surprised because nobody has ever mentioned such a project to me. But as far as I’m concerned, I don’t think it would be a wise decision to do a fourth SCREAM. First, because everything has already been told within the first three movies, and I don’t want to make the one more that would be the wrong one. And second, because Dimension won’t really be interested in contacting me right now after the troubles we had on CURSED.”
As for series star Neve Campbell’s return to the role of Sidney Prescott? “I had a lunch with Neve,” Craven reveals, “where she told me Dimension offered her to reprise her role in SCREAM 4.”
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