Today is a good day. From Collider:
I was curious about the status of your remake of The Monster Squad, and where you were at with Friday the 13th?
FORM: The Monster Squad, we’re not developing anymore.
FULLER: That’s dead.
That comes from an interview with Andrew Form and Brad Fuller, two producers from Platinum Dunes. Their company was trying to remake The Monster Squad for many years and now, thankfully, they’re not. And this is good news because The Monster Squad is a perfect thing. Maybe not a perfect movie, but something else that happens to be perfect. It’s a wish fulfillment story for horror geeks where the meta-commentary about the genre doesn’t grate (“Told’ja. Only one way to kill a werewolf.”) and the earnestness is turned up in ways that make this little movie feel epic, rather than sappy. When Rudy walks down the middle of an empty street to stake a bunch of Dracula’s brides, reasoning, “I’m in the Goddamned club, aren’t I?”—I get the chills. Still.
And it’s rough! The violence isn’t at Savini-levels, but the film gets nasty with the kids on more than a few occasions. Bullies call our leads “faggot” and Dracula calls a little girl (a really little girl) a bitch! And then he hisses at her! It’s been said a million times before, but any attempt to drag this story out of the 80s was only going to smooth down these rough edges and create something more generic in the process. Can you imagine giving any of the kids guns in the 2010s? Or having the Rudy character smoke?
But more than anything, it doesn’t make sense for a bunch of millennial tweens to be obsessed with the classic Universal monsters. The horror culture at the moment doesn’t reflect that even a little. That said, this was being developed at a production shingle that at one time or another had the rights to Leatherface, Jason and Freddy…that might have been a direction worth exploring. Just saying…
Ultimately, this is great news. I didn’t have the heart to see another one of my all-time favorite movies get fed through this particular grinder.