At TG, we’ve looked looked at Back to the Future in a number of different ways, all with love and respect, simply because it’s a great movie. Over the years, I’ve spoken to Bob Gale, who co-wrote Future, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, 1941, and Used Cars with his USC classmate Robert Zemeckis, and he’s always been very generous with his time and memories.
Now according to Variety, Gale is currently adapting a graphic novel called Trespassers which sounds a bit like Peter Jackson’s Frighteners, which Zemeckis ironically produced, except this could actually be a good movie.
The story is about two ghost hunter / myth buster types who venture into a legendary haunted house to try and prove it’s all hokum, except it actually is haunted, and the haunted inhabitants are guarding the gateway to hell.
Considering I hadn’t even heard of Trespassers until this news broke, I have no idea how much humor is in it, but Gale can certainly do a wonderful job of mixing comedy with scares, and he sounds like the right screenwriter for the job. Trespassers is being is being produced by Ryan E Heppe, who is also producing a remake of Short Circuit, as well as movie versions of T.J. Hooker, and V, which of course was just redone as a short lived series.
The graphic novel Trespassers was created by Scott Hampton, who also created a graphic novel called The Upturned Stone, which David Foster (John Carpenter’s The Thing) is producing for Dimension Films. As Heppe told Variety about Trespassers, “A good horror flick needs one thing: a simple, original premise that’s terrifying as hell. Add to that obvious franchise potential, and the opportunity to combine ‘found footage’ – style scares with traditional filmmaking frights and you’ve got something really unique.”
So will Trespassers have some “found footage” style fright? That’s the current thing in horror with the Paranormal Activity flicks, and with Bob Gale at the helm, something different and fun can indeed come from this.
