Movies
Joe Dante Talks Return to Horror and ‘The Hole’ Being 3-D
It’s pretty exciting to see the director of GREMLINS, PIRANHA and THE HOWLING making a huge return to horror with The Hole, but did you know that director Joe Dante doesn’t really find much of an interest in horror films? Beyond the break you can read a portion of an interview where he talks about how he returned to horror and why he decided to shoot in 3-D.
Joe Dante talks to Screen Daily about his new feature, THE HOLE, which was funded by Bold films for approx $15m. First on the list is why he’s returning to horror.
“I’ve made a lot of horror movies but generally don’t find much of interest in them because the material doesn’t appeal to me,” Dante says as he prepares to begin production in Vancouver in December. “This was different: it’s essentially a family-oriented story and I found the quality of the writing and characters to be above average.”
When he read the script for The Hole, a lightbulb clicked on inside his head. “3D seems to be in the news again due to the peripatetic efforts of Jeffrey Katzenberg, so I thought this might be the time to do a 3D movie.”
The story features a family who move into a new house where the children find a bottomless hole in the basement. “Of course, there’s something bad in the hole and I thought we could use 3D to enhance the telling of the story with things not so much coming at you but going away from you.”
Teri Polo, Chris Massoglia and Haley Bennett will star in the film written by Mark L. Smith.
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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