Movies
Matt Letscher To Help Untie The West Memphis Three In ‘Devil’s Knot’
Sweet Hereafter director Atom Egoyan’s West Memphis Three drama Devil’s Knot just keeps casting. The most recent addition is Matt Letscher (pictured inside; Identity, “Scandal”) who will play defense attorney to Jason Baldwin, one of the WM3.
Per Deadline, “ Matt Letscher has joined Devil’s Knot. The actor will play defense attorney Paul Ford in the Atom Egoyan-directed film about the West Memphis 3. Letscher is scheduled to start filming on ‘Devil’s Knot’ early next month.”
The pic is based on investigative reporter Mara Leveritt’s 2002 book “Devil’s Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three,” which chronicled the prolonged murder trial of defendants Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr., who served 18 years in prison before being released in August. The trio were accused of killing Christopher Byers, Michael Moore and Stevie Branch, three 8-year-old boys who were found brutally murdered and hog-tied in a wooded area of West Memphis, Arkansas known as Robin Hood Hills.
The film stars Reese Witherspoon (Freeway, Legally Blonde) as Pam Hobbs, the mother of one of the victims. Hobbs originally believed that Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley murdered her son, but as the case dragged on and more details became available, she came to believe that the trio did not commit the heinous crime. Colin Firth (A Single Man) will also star. Recent additions to the cast include Kristopher Higgins, Collette Wolfe, Justin Castor, Kris Polaha and Seth Meriwether.
Mark Sevi wrote the original draft of the screenplay, with the current draft penned by Scott Derrickson (whose Sinister has some really great scares) and Paul Boardman.
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.”
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