No less than five of director Bob Clark’s 30 films are in one stage or another of being remade right now; while Howard Stern is planning a new PORKY’S, Glen Morgan and James Wong are currently filming a BLACK CHRISTMAS redux and GRUDGE scripter Stephen Susco and director John Stalberg Jr. are reworking DEATHDREAM into a new war-themed chiller called ZERO DARK THIRTY. And Clark himself is now officially ending his long hiatus from the genre by taking the helm of a new version of his first fright flick, 1972’s CHILDREN SHOULDN’T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS.
“People have been after me for so long, and I’ve tried to remake a couple of them,” Clark tells FANGORIA. “I have no distain for horror. Quite the opposite, There are many classic, great horror films; I don’t think the genre has anything whatsoever to apologize for. I haven’t avoided it for that reason, I just…I had trouble getting out of it. I tried a couple of times to do THE DREAMERS, the [Roger] Manvell novel—a brilliant piece. We came very close about a year ago. The [industry] feeling was that horror was fading. Were they wrong, or were they wrong?”
Clark’s CHILDREN SHOULDN’T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS redux will open with a bang: an action setpiece with plenty of mayhem that sets up the history of the island setting, and introduces important new characters—so immediately, the bigger budget will be evident on screen. The new opening sequence will culminate in a twist that will take us into the main story, and from that point on the movie will quite closely follow the plot of the original, as a group of moviemakers travel to the remote location to shoot, and end up raising the dead.
“It’s a film company with about 40 people, and the same five or six actor [characters] who were in the original,” Clark explains. “But the difference is, I’ve got three places now where there’s a war going on: at the cabin where all the actors are; the grips and electricians are all in another cabin; and there’s a battle going on out in the graveyard. So we’ve got intercuts. These ghouls are going to become very intelligent. They’re watching. They get ahold of cell phones, they’re watching television, they see some rap—we’re going to have ghouls doing some rap. It’ll be just totally outrageous, yet still horrifying and scary.”
You can catch Clark at the Burbank Fango con in a rare personal appearance.
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