Movies
Raimi’s Ghost House Preps Two More Remakes
Their track record isn’t all that impressive as Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures has brought us multiple Boogeyman, Grudge and Messengers films, along with a bunch of other disappointing direct-to-disc films. While 30 Days of Night was a pretty solid flick, Sam Raimi has proven he’s still a master of horror with his upcoming Drag Me to Hell, which makes me wonder how much input he’s really giving to these films. Either way, Ghost House has announced two more horror remakes, one of which was already revealed here on Bloody-Disgusting a year and a half ago. Read on for the story.Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures is remaking a pair of European horror films.
First up is Anguish, a remake of the 1987 Spanish pic that was written and directed by Bigas Luna. The company behind such horror hits as The Grudge films has also acquired the remake rights to the Danish movie Room 205 (trailer), which was first reported on Bloody Disgusting back in October of 2007.
Anguish follows two girls who, while watching a scary movie, find themselves in a horror film of their own when their life starts to mirror the pic’s plot.
Jake Wade Wall (When a Stranger Calls, Amusement, The Hitcher) penned the screenplay.
Ghost House’s Raimi and Rob Tapert are producing Anguish alongside Vertigo Entertainment’s Roy Lee and Doug Davison (The Strangers). Ghost House and Vertigo previously worked together on The Grudge and The Grudge 2. Mandate Pictures’ Nathan Kahane and Vertigo’s Sonny Mallhi will exec produce, and George Ayoub will co-produce.
Ghost House has tapped Room 205 director Martin Barnewitz to helm the English-language remake, which is being redubbed The Dorm.
The story centers on a college freshman who moves into a dorm only to find that her room is haunted by sinister forces. Stephen Susco, who wrote The Grudge and The Grudge 2, is adapting.
Raimi and Rob Tapert will produce The Dorm, and Kahane will exec produce.
Pictured: ROOM 205
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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