Movies
Johnny Depp And Edgar Wright’s ‘The Night Stalker’ Has A Writer
Edgar Wright (Shaun Of The Dead, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World) was announced as the director for The Night Stalker a few months back. Disney is eyeing the remake of the ABC telepic and series as a potential star vehicle for Johnny Depp (Dark Shadows, A Nightmare on Elm Street) to play intrepid tabloid reporter Carl Kolchak.
Now comes word that D.V. DeVincentis (High Fidelity, Gross Pointe Blank) will be the screenwriter on the project. Per The Hollywood Reporter “D.V. DeVincentis has been tapped to write Disney’s big-screen adaptation of ‘The Night Stalker’. Stalker is one of the more high-profile projects in the works at the studio because Johnny Depp is attached to star and Edgar Wright is attached to direct.”
I’m guessing that Devincentis will be plowing through his drafts while Wright preps and shoots The World’s End with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. So we’re probably looking at 2013 for World’s End and 2014 for The Night Stalker.
The original ’70s movie and series starred Darren McGavin. He covered crime for a tabloid and his cases always led to supernatural perpetrators that included zombies, vampires, werewolves and aliens. Of course, neither his editor nor anyone else would believe him or allow him to run what seemed like outrageous stories. But Kolchak would put himself in grave danger each episode.
It’s been eight years since Ari Aster came onto the scene and helped usher in a new wave of horror with Hereditary, one of the rare horror movies from the past ten years that still seems to come up in conversation every single week. And it’s back in the conversation this week, with Ari Aster revealing at an event that he’s already written a prequel to Hereditary!
Ari Aster was on hand at the American Cinematheque for Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair last week, a Los Angeles festival that screened all of Aster’s movies to date. The website Gold Derby reports that Aster revealed the Hereditary prequel script during a Q&A at the event, and you can watch the full Q&A conversation below for confirmation on the website’s report.
“I wrote a prequel to this,” Aster told the crowd, referring to Hereditary. “It never feels like the right time to do it. It’s a prequel, not a sequel so I don’t know where this goes.”
Would a potential Hereditary prequel dig deeper into the mythology of demon king Paimon? Unfortunately, Aster provides no further details on his prequel approach at this time.
Aster said of Hereditary during the same Q&A, “I was just trying to make a really good horror movie.” I think most horror fans would agree that he more than accomplished that goal, and the past eight years have proven that Hereditary is an enduring classic of its generation.
We celebrated the fifth anniversary of Hereditary here on BD back in 2023.
Ron Breton wrote, “Hereditary offers a similar emotional resonance to this new generation of horror – my generation of horror– as movie-goers in the seventies when they first saw Exorcist. Much like Aster’s film, we see the incomprehensible evil wear the face of a young girl; the victim of a raw deal she had no say in, as it tears a family to its core. Sure, both films offer so many terrifying visuals that can make the hair stand up on anyone’s neck – but it also depicts intense relationships and emotions that are tangible. Real. Familiar.”
“In that familiarity lies the uncanny, ready to rear its ugly head and force us to confront thoughts and horrors laying dormant and clawing at our psyche,” Breton continued his 5th anniversary celebration of Hereditary. “And it doesn’t matter if it’s been five or fifty years. These horrors are always there, as we become pawns in its horrible, hopeless machine.”
Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, Ann Dowd, and Milly Shapiro star in Hereditary. In the film, “A grieving family is haunted by tragic and disturbing occurrences.”
That’s putting it mildly, eh?!
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