Movies
Is ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ Being Remade Or Am I Hallucinationing?
It was only a matter of time until we climbed Jacob’s Ladder again.
Mickey Liddell’s LD Entertainment (Black Rock, The Collection) is financing a remake of the 1990 movie that starred Tim Robbins which will be produced by Michael Gaeta and Alison Rosenzweig (who also produced the remake of Fright Night and is also developing a remake of the 1987 Mickey Rourke-Lisa Bonet thriller Angel Heart). Liddell is also producing with the company’s Jennifer Monroe.
Jeff Buhler, who wrote the Clive Barker adaptation The Midnight Meat Train, is penning a script building upon an earlier draft by Jake Wade Wall, the scribe behind the 2006 remake of When a Stranger Calls and the 2007 Hitcher.
The original Ladder, written by Bruce Joel Rubin and directed by Adrian Lyne, ostensibly told of a Vietnam vet who suffers increasingly bizarre hallucinations and attempts to discover the truth behind them. The movie, which has a twist ending, was made by Carolco and achieved cult hit status.
The producers are looking to make something more akin to an homage and not mimic the original. The plan is to contemporize the story with new situations and characters but still maintain a story that examines issues and poses existential questions.
Two things that have proven to be pretty dependable at the box office in recent years are horror movies and Christopher Nolan movies. With Nolan’s The Odyssey absolutely dominating the box office this past weekend, many fans of Nolan’s work have been left hungry for a Nolan-directed horror movie. After all, The Odyssey does whet the appetite for Nolan nightmare fuel.
Christopher Nolan has brushed up against the horror genre in the past with 2002 thriller Insomnia, but does he have any interest in someday making a full-on horror movie?
Nolan tells the Empire Podcast in a new chat, “I’ve always been interested in doing a horror film.”
“But horror is most successful when the conceptual framework of whatever the story is is just so undeniable. I think there are very few really great horror movies,” Nolan continues.
So why hasn’t Christopher Nolan directed a horror movie yet?
He explains to Empire, “I’ve never clicked with a particular idea or concept that worked for me. I love the genre. Of all genres, it’s the most visceral. Where the direct response to the audience is the most important. That is to say, you’re trying to make people literally feel something in their bones about what’s going on on-screen.”
Nolan calls horror “a genre in which experimentation is demanded.” He explains, “I go to see a lot of horror films with my kids these days, and you’ll see things in the first half an hour, 45 minutes of any horror film that you’d never see in another genre. Risks that are taken. Dangerous approaches to things. Admittedly, a lot of movies can’t sustain that to the end. But in the horror genre, that kind of innovation is not just respected – it’s really demanded.”
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is now playing in theaters.
Cillian Murphy as Scarecrow in Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Dark Knight’ (2008)
You must be logged in to post a comment.