Worry not, Chewers, Paramount’s Black Hole will not be a remake of the seminal floating robot film, but rather an adaptation of Charles Burns’ black and white graphic novel about a group of kids hit with a very, very weird STD.
It took Burns ten years to finish his 12 part story, which has just been released in a really gorgeous hardcover collection (click here to buy it from CHUD!). Set in 1970s Seattle, Black Hole follows a group of teens – some of whom have the STD, some who don’t, and some who will get it – as they live their lives. What makes Black Hole interesting – besides the STD which tends to mutate people in grotesque ways – is that it isn’t about a search for a cure or a vision of a post-apocalyptic plague society. It’s about the very nature of high school alienation, and it examines a time not unlike our own, where culture was in a weird doldrums.
Alexandre Aja, who is directing the remake of The Hills Have Eyes, and who made the very unfairly maligned High Tension, will be directing the film. Good old Brad Pitt’s Plan B is producing. There’s no release date yet. Aja seems a perfect choice to me – just take a look at Burns’ cartoonish yet palpably gritty illustrations and compare it to the textures of High Tension.