During B-D’s recent chat with writing team Marcus Dunstan & Patrick Melton to talk Saw VII and The Collector, they also touched briefly on the other projects they have coming up in the near future. While they were mostly mum, they did spill some very general details about the next two films on their slate. Read on for the skinny.
“There’s two other projects that I just can’t mention yet,” said Melton. “They’re pretty big projects, but we shouldn’t really mention them yet. For publication, you know. But we’re pretty immersed in some other big horror properties right now.”

Trying to get anything I possibly could out of them, I also asked whether the projects would be in line with their previous, hard-“R” horror credits like ‘Saw’ and ‘The Collector’.

“Well actually, what’s great is they couldn’t be further from it,” Dunstan said. “One is very much science-fiction, the other one is very much adult fantasy. And so, you know, we’ve had a good run with trying to blend humor with horror in the ‘Feast’ films, and then the straight terror and the mysteries of the ‘Saw’ films, and we have one more…hopefully one more kind of ‘giallo-on-steroids’ edition for ‘The Collector’ [meaning the sequel], to pound that home. And this whole time, we’ve always had imaginations for films of all types, and this well of science fiction and fantasy is built up well beyond our heads. So we’re pretty lucky to be really close to the signing line on a couple that would allow us to do that, and hopefully show you guys another angle.”

Alarm bells immediately started going off in my head, and I wondered if perhaps the duo would be going the way of directors like Peter Jackson and Sam Raimi in deviating from their horror roots. Melton reassured me these films indeed will be worthy of coverage on Bloody-Disgusting.

“The sci-fi movie does have elements of horror as well,” he said. “The fantasy movie’s about a serial killer… that’s horror. So they’re within the same school as the horror we’ve been playing with, but just perhaps a little bit bigger in scale, that’s all. And it’s not like we’re doing ‘Pretty Woman 2’. That would probably be the furthest thing from what we’re doing, I imagine.”

Melton also seemed to shoot down the idea that he’d ever follow in Dunstan’s footsteps and take a stab at directing a film on his own.

“I’m just waiting for [Marcus] to be fired on one of these projects so I can just step in. [Laughter] No, that’s not really the plan. It’s not really how we work. Marcus is the director. We write together, Marcus directs. And I show up for two hours right around lunch and then go home. [Laughter] Directing’s hard work, man. All that time! I get tired just thinking about it.“