Movies
Hot Genre Writer Does Polish Of Neil Marshall’s ‘Hellfest’
Gary Dauberman, who established a reputation for himself as New Line’s go-to writer for production work on horror projects (he did revisions on the most recent Final Destination and Nightmare on Elm Street movies), has been brought on to polish CBS Films’ Hellfest, TheWrap has learned.
Neil Marshall (The Descent, Dog Soldiers, Doomsday, Centurion) is directing the movie.
According to CBS, “the film is about a Halloween night of fun that turns deadly at America’s premiere horror-themed park when an actual costumed serial killer begins slaying patrons who believe it’s all part of the show.”
CBS is hot on the project, which is hopes to start shooting this summer and turn into a franchise.
Mandate and Ghost House Pictures recently brought Dauberman on to polish Burst, a spec he brought the companies. Meanwhile, his Crawlspace, set up at New Line, is out to directors. New Line has targeted the movie for production this year.
Gale Anne Hurd, the renowned producer of “The Walking Dead”, The Terminator, The Abyss and Armageddon, among others – and who wrote The Terminator – is producing through her Valhalla Entertainment.
First-time feature writers William Penick and Chris Sey co-wrote the first draft of Hellfest from a concept by Valhalla creative executive Ben Roberts, who will executive produce.
Remember the Jim Carrey movie The Mask back in the 1990s? The film ended up being a family friendly affair, but did you know that it began its life as a New Line horror project?!
Chuck Russell (A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, The Blob) directed the 1994 movie starring Jim Carrey, which was based on the comic series from Dark Horse Comics. The darker, more violent comics ultimately became a family friendly slapstick comedy, but New Line actually originally hoped to use the property to create their next Freddy Krueger.
As Russell himself explained way back in 2017, “It’s a great example of really fighting for your vision in a film. We changed it from a horror film into a comedy. It was originally conceived as being a horror film. That was a real battle. New Line wanted a new kind of Freddy movie.”
“I had seen the same original Mask comic they ended up buying, and I thought, ‘That’s really cool, but it’s too derivative of Freddy Krueger.’ He would put on the mask and kill people. And have one-liners. It was a really cool, splatterpunk, black and white comic,” Russell continued. “They’ve redone the comics to be more like my movie, but the original comics were really cool, dark and scary. But I knew, as a film, it would be very reminiscent of Freddy Krueger.”
Could The Mask someday return to the screen with a darker adaptation more in line with the original comic books? One filmmaker who has thrown his hat into that race is Sébastien Vaniček, who follows up his spider horror movie Infested with the now-in-theaters Evil Dead Burn. In a Reddit AMA this week, the French filmmaker floated the idea in a response to a fan.
When asked which intellectual property he’d be interested in getting his hands on next, Vaniček replied: “I think I would dig into The Mask, but make it closer to the comic books.”
He added, “The comic books are actually very, very violent and dark.”
What would 1994’s The Mask look like as a horror movie? Find out below!