Movies
Tom Holland Remaking His Own ‘The Beast Within’
In 1982 Fright Night and Child’s Play director Tom Holland got his start when his screenplay for The Beast Within was put into production.
Directed by Philippe Mora, the film followed a teenager that is experiencing growing pains of a most shocking kind in this all-too-real story of a human-into monster transformation.
Fangoria caught up with Holland, who reveals that he’s currently developing a remake because some of what he wrote couldn’t be filmed for the 1982 release.
That’s why “I am now preparing a remake,” he tells the site. “Cicadas were a large part of the script I wrote; their 17-year transformation foreshadowed what was happening to Michael [the afflicted young hero played by Paul Clemens]. You couldn’t work with insects then, couldn’t capture what I wrote, but CGI now does make that possible.”
He points out, however, that he would not want Michael’s climactic shapeshift into a monster to be done digitally. “Michael’s transformation should still be old-school, done in-camera. The lure of a remake is to finally be able to do what I originally wrote.”
In the original, 18-year-old Michael MacCleary (the progeny of an unholy union between his mother and a swamp beast) is on the verge of becoming a man. And as the inherited evil in his blood gnaws at his soul, Michael must return to the swamp to uncover the terrifying identity of his father: before his nasty natural tendencies force him to feed on the locals!
Holland’s 10 O’Clock People has been in development for years now. His Twisted Tales hit video this year, and his last feature was the 1996 Thinner.
The filmmakers behind Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey are expanding their public domain horror universe with a handful of upcoming “Poohniverse” movies, including Bambi: The Reckoning, Pinocchio: Unstrung, and Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare.
Variety has scored the first image from Neverland Nightmare, seen above.
The website details, “Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare follows Wendy Darling as she strikes out in an attempt to rescue her brother Michael from ‘the clutches of the evil Peter Pan.’ Along the way she meets Tinkerbell, who in this twisted version of the story will be seen taking heroine, convinced that it’s pixie dust.”
Scott Jeffrey will direct Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare, expected Halloween 2024.
Jeffrey tells us, “I am taking inspiration from French cinema while in prep for this movie. The film will be incredibly tense. I would say it’s a mesh between Switchblade Romance and The Black Phone with our own spin on it. It is a nasty, violent and incredibly dark movie.”
Megan Placito has joined the cast as Wendy Darling, Kit Green is Tinkerbell, Peter DeSouza-Feighoney (The Pope’s Exorcist) is Michael Darling and Charity Kase (RuPaul Drag Race) is James. Martin Portlock will be playing the twisted version of Peter Pan.
Created by J.M. Barrie way back in 1902, the character of Peter Pan – like Winnie the Pooh – is in the public domain, even if the iconic Disney iteration of the character is very much not.
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