Movies
David Cronenberg’s ‘Rabid’ Is Getting Remade As a Film and Television Series
David Cronenberg’s early entry into body horror, Rabid, is set to be remade with Jen and Sylvia Soska attached to direct, Variety reports.
John Vidette’s Somerville House Releasing has entered into a joint venture with Paul Lalonde and Michael Walker to produce a feature film and original TV series based on the 1977 Canadian horror film.
Rabid starred Marilyn Chambers in a film that “explored the world of experimental plastic surgery with Chambers playing a woman injured in a motorcycle accident who underwent a surgical operation and developed a stinger that she uses to feed on people’s blood — triggering an outbreak of a rabies-like epidemic that turned its victims into bloodthirsty zombies.“
The Soskas, who are identical twin sisters from British Columbia, directed American Mary, Dead Hooker in a Trunk and See No Evil 2.
“The work of David Cronenberg is legendary and Rabid is much more than just a horror movie,” the Soskas said. “The real message of his film is powerful, and even more pivotal as we look at the world around us today. It’s an honor to be involved in this love letter to his original, which we handle with the same respect as Paul Schrader’s Cat People, Alexandre Aja’s The Hills Have Eyes and John Carpenter’s The Thing.”
Rabid was one of Cronenberg’s first films. He followed it with Fast Company, Scanners, The Brood, Videodrome, The Dead Zone and even The Fly.
Filming will take place in the summer in Canada.
Universal has been having a hell of a time getting their Universal Monsters brand back on a better path in the wake of the Dark Universe collapsing, with four movies thus far released in the years since The Mummy attempted to get that interconnected universe off the ground.
First was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, to date the only post-Mummy hit for the Universal Monsters, followed by The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and now Abigail. The latter three films have attempted to bring Dracula back to the screen in fresh ways, but both Demeter and Renfield severely underperformed at the box office. And while Abigail is a far better vampire movie than those two, it’s unfortunately also struggling to turn a profit.
Where does the Universal Monsters brand go from here? The good news is that Universal and Blumhouse have once again enlisted the help of Leigh Whannell for their upcoming Wolf Man reboot, which is howling its way into theaters in January 2025. This is good news, of course, because Whannell’s Invisible Man was the best – and certainly most profitable – of the post-Dark Universe movies that Universal has been able to conjure up. The film ended its worldwide run with $144 million back in 2020, a massive win considering the $7 million budget.
Given the film was such a success, you may wondering why The Invisible Man 2 hasn’t come along in these past four years. But the wait for that sequel may be coming to an end.
Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, The Invisible Man star Elisabeth Moss notes that she feels “very good” about the sequel’s development at this point in time.
“Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures]… we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss updates this week. “And I feel very good about it.”
She adds, “We are very much intent on continuing that story.”
At the end of the 2020 movie, Elisabeth Moss’s heroine Cecilia Kass uses her stalker’s high-tech invisibility suit to kill him, now in possession of the technology that ruined her life.
Stay tuned for more on The Invisible Man 2 as we learn it.
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