Cool News
Sam Raimi To Direct The Murderous TRIFFIDS!!
I am – Hercules!!
One of my favorite stories is about to be tackled by one of my favorite filmmakers.
Sam Raimi plans to direct a remake of “Day of The Triffids,” the tale of mobile, literally bloodthirsty plants who start preying on humankind after a meteor shower renders more than 99 percent of the world’s population blind.
Mandate Pictures outbid Warner Bros. to secure the rights for Raimi on Wednesday; he’s a fan of the 1962 original. John Wyndham’s 1951 sci-fi novel also served as the basis of two British miniseries.
I haven’t yet seen the 2009 version, but I rewatched the 1981 miniseries about a month ago and found it excellent. (I was trying to appraise similarities to the upcoming “Walking Dead” series but got sucked into watching the whole thing.)
Raimi’s directorial credits include the “Evil Dead” trilogy, the “Spider-Man” trilogy, “The Quick and the Dead,” “A Simple Plan,” “Drag Me To Hell” and “Darkman.”
Find all of Deadline’s story on the matter here.
Follow Herc on Twitter!!
Follow Evil Herc on Twitter!!
Readers Talkback
comments powered by Disqus-
+ Expand All
-
That is all.
-
The Spiderman films could have been done by any director, it had no real style (and part 3? come on!). I own Evil Dead and Army of Darkness was fun but let it go. I'm not just knocking him. We need to start looking for newer exciting directors instead of hoping an old favorite lives up to our standards. Then, in the future we can say the new exciting director is overrated.....sad but true.
-
the last remake on a british mini-series was decent but seriously do we need to revisit this once more when "Stranger in a Strange Land" is still to be made?
-
Will it have a soundtrack by The Triffids? http://tinyurl.com/42qoko
-
Oct. 21, 2010, 12:47 a.m. CST
So much kickass sci fi out there, no reason for remakes
by nick_noltes_neckhair
-
the recent mini-series was terrible but the BBC's original version was good. Wyndam works because his characters are from a specific time and place. Oh and sorry cifra but much as I love it I don't think "Stranger in a Strange Land" could be made into anything worth watching. Just enjoy the book
-
there goes one of my favorites down the shitter! :o(
-
showed as much restraint and Independence as Bill Watterson and his "Calvin and Hobbes." You know, don't let people walk all over yourself. Quit when you think you should. Keep your creation intact at all costs. When I was little I would have probably loved a Calvin and Hobbes movie. I am now eternally grateful it never happened. Movies aren't comic strips, but filmmakers could make an effort.
-
Sounds like something Raimi could have fun with. Need to check out the 80's mini. Still getting tired of him jerking us around saying "ED4 is coming soon! We're writing it! Swear!"
-
if you can get the Triffid design right. They are inherently laughable, after all!
-
Never gonna happen.
-
...that Wyndham is all about the collapse of society under specific conditions. <p> Everything else is secondary.
-
The 80's version did as good a job as you're going to get adapting the book. Just a pity they couldn't have had a little more money to work with.. And I own that edition of the book as well.
-
Oct. 21, 2010, 1:44 a.m. CST
Raimi keeps getting signed for movies that don't go anywhere.
by Tarijeno
The Shadow, Warcraft, Wizard of Oz, etc. Were Spider-man 3 and Drag Me to Hell really bad enough to stall this guy's career? It just feels like all we hear from Raimi nowadays is announcements, but no production...
-
Sam Raimi is good -unless you are a whiny spiderman nerd-
-
Hope this is half as good
-
Raimi will never make ED 4. Just never happening folks. He keeps puttiing it off. He says he has a script but will it ever get anywhere? Now he's deciding to remake something rather than give the entire world what they want, ED 4?
-
I'm thinking that World of WarCraft movie is dead in the water then seeing that Sam keeps getting signed on for film after film after film.
-
Give him the starring role and play it half straight and half funny, like Drag Me to Hell. I mean, how else are you going to deal with 6 foot killer plants. They are a stupid creation and the last mini-series on the BBC they were hilariously bad. Having said that, the story is solid and has been reworked lots of times. 28 days later was almost the same story but had zombies instead of plants.
-
MJDeViant, here's an interesting article from this site back in 2002: http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?q=node/12534<BR><BR> Now, neither actor have those characters linked on their portfolios any longer but they did back then.<BR><BR> Would have been cool had Bill Watterson successfully put together a feature film in his basement and shock the world with its release in theaters. Ah well.
-
It should start out at a cabin in the woods with a whole new young cast who undergo what the kids did in the first one...but half way through ASH turns up to help the kids defeat the deadites before passing on his Kingly mantle to the survivor of this new ordeal - and make her a sexy gal with a chainsaw hand, part deadite punk bitch with rock attitude. Why not.
-
remade by the bbc 2 years ago and not along after the death of natachsa richardson. it starred joely richardson, eddie izzard and dougray scott. with jason priestly and brian cox and ewen bremner. the cinematography looked stunning but it was awful. and bypassed the plants completely. and had something to do with oil. the clue is in the name of the company in the film. triffidoil...
-
...and the US marines will save the entire world by shooting, bombing and incinerating anything with chlorophyll. God bless america.
-
I love me some Triffids but this property seems better suited for Tim Burton IMO.
-
...otherwise we´ll be seeing Evil Dead 4 sooner than expected.
-
And his style was all over the Spidey films, MJDeViant ... it was one of the things I liked about them, and one of the reasons I could appreciate part 3: It was still a Raimi movie with many of his little trademarks, and that was fun to see.
-
It's worth a watch!
-
Triffids is a great story and all, but it's been told three times. Why not create a new story using the mythology of one of the moat recent pop culture phenomenons?
-
nothing to see here!
-
and need to change their pants once in a while.
-
Really wanted him to do WOW. Yeah. Player since Beta. Sue me.
-
....and the 80's version still holds up due to its downbeat non Hollywood style but its not really A list movie material. Like others have said, plenty other more worthy stuff to be done.
-
The involuntary shitting only happens when you have drank to many Dew's and eaten too much microwave popcorn--and then ONLY while raiding and you're not allowed to leave ur keyboard.
-
The Day of the Triffids is not about man eating plants, but about societal collapse, and human response. And please Sam, set it in England where it's supposed to be set, don't just take the idea and write your own story, that's not what filming 'a book' is all about. Remember how appalling SHIT 'Village of the Damned' (The Midwich Cuckoos) was when remade by Mr Carpenter and transplanted to the US.
-
I was going into withdrawal waiting for the next remake. It had been a whole YEAR, after all and I wasn't sure how much longer I could hold on ... (Yes, that was pure, unadulterated sarcasm.)
-
I've never understood the need to make this over and over and over. Similar to the soon to be 3rd incarnation of Dune. STOP. There are good stories out there. Quit remaking crap.
-
and please Sam, don't forget that we just saw a little film called Avatar that had networked plants. By the way, Triffids aren't plants; they are a new phylum (Motilia) because they share both plant and animal features. Better to think of them as a crab that can photosynthesize. And, Sam...don't forget most of us geeks saw the Ruins, and they were basically caged Triffids.
-
So long as it is told well and not completely reliant upon location it does not matter where it takes place.
-
what a dissapointing POS that movie was.shame mr Raimi,shame.
-
... you don't. It's called an opinion, and they are like arseholes, we all have them. The Day of the Triffids was written by a quintessential English writer and he set it in England, because if he'd want to set it in the US or Tibet or the Orkneys he would have done. He didn't... so if you're filming the book, you set it it in England. If you don't you're making a 'conceit' and imposing your own ego upon the source material. The city of London is 'character' in the book, as much as Bill Mason, Josella and Coker. But you're right, no-one should give a shit, no-one at all...
-
Well, I'm sure Mr. Raimi will find a way to fuck this film up somehow. It's a fantastic novel, one of my favourites, but I don't see Raimi doing this one justice. Maybe we'll see Emo Triffids dancing?
-
I'm looking forward to this anyway but now a decent director is directing it i'm looking forward to too even more.
-
Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors. Fuck Yeah!
-
Every major project in development right now is either a remake, sequel, prequel or based on a well known literary staple or comic book. I'm so sick of this shit! In the last eleven years only TWO genre films based on original properties blew me away - the first Matrix film and Inception. TWO! Where the fuck has the originality gone? Is Hollywood incapable of taking chances anymore?
-
Unfortunately, the mouth breathing troglodytes inhabiting these talkbacks are incapable of appreciating it.<p><p> Show some respect. It was brilliantly constructed to display two simultaneous narratives, the first being a shallow surface level about a goofy random curse being cast, and a girl trying desperately to avoid this random curse. On the second, more profound level, it was about a girl who sins our of cruelty, causing a demon to start haunting her by FIRST pretending to be the old womean she had been cruel to, and pretending to cast a curse on her, while it is her own actions to avoid the "curse" that actually end up sending her to hell. Did you all notice what the psychic said to her when she first consulted him "Did you blaspheme the dead while visiting the graveyard?" "NO!" says Christine, but she doesn't say what she has done ... taken a poor sick old woman's house away, and in the end, she IS blaspheming that same old woman in a graveyard, trying to send her to hell! And ironically, that's the sin that finally gets her dragged, trying to send someone else there. <p><p> I really don't know what is wrong with people. Do they really not see the underlying morality tale? Do the really only see it as a big goofy joke about vomit? Or are they mad at Sam Raimi for slipping in some realy moral message into a story that they thought would be just goofs and yucks? Whatever, it's a damn damn shame.
-
One of my top 5 directors (with Peter Jackson, Christopher Smith, QT and Luc Besson)taking on one of my fave 3 books (with the Dark Towers and the FAYZ series)? Won't believe it until I have the cinema ticket in my hot sweaty little hand. Thanks for even suggesting the possibility tho, this would be an awesome movie.
-
Give it a rest. "Emo spider-man" was at least having fun ... it was a break from all the moping and whining in all three films. And Spider-Man 3 had the very best web-swinging action scenes of all the films. Plus, with 3 villains crammed into the story, the time for the moping and whining and misunderstanding between Peter and Mary Jane was necessarily cut down. And as an added bonus, the film managed to hone the themes that were later used for Drag Me To Hell, and Drag Me To Hell used the same cinematographer and composer ... watching them back to back is quite instructive!
-
I didn't like the recent TV remake, but I'd love to see Raimi make a luridly colorful version of Triffids. I don't care if it's faithful to the book or not (the recent version certainly wasn't) - I just want some cool monster plant action!
-
I hope i'm wrong though
-
... it was depressing and grim. Let's hope Raimi rewrites it towards his own ends.
-
It's my favourite Wyndham novel by far and could make an incredibly relevant and awardsy movie.<p>But TRIFFIDS and maybe A SIMPLE PLAN/THE GIFT-era Raimi makes me excited. I hope he can pull it off.
-
I hope you're kidding. We don't need a "fun" Triffids. The book is supposed to be grim and depressing. It's a cautionary tale. If Raimi rewrites it to "his own ends" then I hope he calls it something else and makes it something other than Day of the Triffids. Good lord...
-
but I don't think it can be a movie. I can't imagine Triffids that wouldn't look too campy. Just change them to Zombies and call it 28 Days Later.
-
It was perfect in tone and feel for what Triffids needs to be, basically because it was Day of the Triffids to a point.
-
They made the triffids so overpowering (with their tentacle-like roots that can grab a person running twenty feet away) that the major fear component of being stuck blind in a world with triffids was all but moot. The 80's miniseries is vastly superior!
-
The recent Triffids remake was awful. I don't understand why remakes always end up so soulless and terrible. It was the same thing with Andromeda Strain and Quatermass. I remember the Triffids scared the shit out of me as a child, the whole series was really creepy. With somebody of Raimi's talent we will hopefully get a genuinely scary film.
-
was essentially Evil Dead 4, with a female heroine and an underlying theme of anorexia.
-
There you go.
-
I love the old mini-series, and thought the new BBC remake was a mess, but I LOVE the story. This type of story needs someone one like Raimi to make it relevant and coherent enough for a feature length film. How about RDJ for the lead!
-
happens in just a few pages near the end of the book, when the protagonists start wondering about Triffid spores, and all the cotton-candy like fibre the Triffids scatter around. In 1951 Wyndham was considering, if very briefly, the possibility of networked life forms.
-
(And yes, I know DARKMAN is essentially Raimi's version of THE SHADOW.)
-
Jeanette Scott fight a triffid that spits poison and kills.
-
Showed just enough promise, just enough of the Raimi we all love...I was really looking forward to a personal renaissance. Dunno, holding my breath, but...Can someone write an at least superficially original story?
-
earth. They are the biggest and oldest earth creatures and have intricate neural-like networks that send electrical brain-pattern looking activity all through them. They think and move and even seem to behave animalisticly under high-speed photography. I hope this movie really plays up the brain network under the soil that is very real
-
bidding. Plants didn't just evolve alongside bees. They chose bees and gave bees a drug to make them do that shit
-
Bruce Campbell getting in a chainsaw fight with an army of poisonous plants. Oh yeah, the 2009 miniseries was ridiculously bad.
-
And I love the BBC 1981 serialisation, but I don't think Sam Raimi is the right choice. I'd like to see Fincher get his teeth into it - or even do a truly worthy version of Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos!! Its time it was exhumed and dutifully delivered!!
-
Oct. 21, 2010, 12:32 p.m. CST
Regardless of critical reaction, Drag Me to Hell was a failure.
by Tarijeno
It made $90 million on a $30 million dollar budget, which was profitable, but I just think the studio was hoping for Spider-man money. If Jackass 3D can make $60 million on it's opening weekend in the middle of October, why can't Sam Raimi drum up $15 million in May? And yes, I know this is a fanboy forum, and nobody gives a shit about money, but ultimately if you're a filmmaker who can't make money, good luck making films.
-
I would rather see that.
-
AVATAR shows that the visuals for this are certainly doable -- along with TRANSFORMERS and DISTRICT 9.<p>Imagine effects for the Prawn aliens or the Transformers, but only foliage-esque.
-
...was brilliant. I even have fondness for the 1963 film version starring Howard Keel despite the changes from the book- killed by salt water! Just realised M Night copied that for Signs! LOL! If they do make this faithfully I can imagine all the people who have not read the book saying- "wow this has ripped off 28 Days Later!" Seriously I do not know how Danny Boyle and Garland did not get done for plagirism on that one. Love the book- if Hollywood make it please be faithful and please set it in the UK!!!!!
-
Finally Raimi can get back to the fetish that started his career!!
-
Whilst I agree that the recent mini-series was almost totally appalling, the main charcter in the original novel works with cultivated Triffids - grown for their amazingly useful oil. The mini-series merely expanded slightly on this element.
-
I agree. I've been saying for years that Garland and Boyle deserve a kicking for such theft. The best parts of that film don't belong to them at all, but Mr Wyndham.
-
Mate, after I came out of 28 Days later at the flicks with a mate I was seriously in shock by how much they had ripped off Mr Wyndham and how they got away with it. My friend had not read the book, watched the TV or even really remembered Triffids although he may have caught the 1963 movie on late night TV so did not understand and thought 28 Days Later was "genius". Sigh.
-
......really was horrible. Pandering to old-school horror fans does not make a good horror movie.
-
And Raimi is patchy at best.
-
I don't know how the fuck he's going to make a serious film about murderous alien fucking plants. Unles that's not the plan and he's going to make it a black comedy. THAT would be pretty cool.</p><p>Didn't Raimi sign up to do The Dark Tower or something?
-
Raimi was supposed to direct next. Is that dead then?
-
There's NO WAY Universal could've expected Spider-Man money from a relatively small horror film, regardless of the director. For one thing, it opened in 2500 theaters, nearly 2000 fewer than SM3. Sure, $42 mil domestic was undoubtedly less than they hoped for, but only a RETARDED studio head could've expected upwards of $300 million for Drag Me to Hell.
-
Raimi has specifically said numerous times that he is going to make a new movie and then the WOW,since Bliz has a strict schedule to follow first with the new expansion and the Diablo3 game.
-
So that aspect of Triffids is likely to be preserved, so you can rest easy. But Raimi will at least inject some sort of humor to leaven the grim depressing one-note of the book, in my opinion.
-
I'm not saying they were expecting a billion dollars out of Drag Me to Hell. What I am saying is the studio ASSUMED more people would pay to see DMTH simply because they loved Spider-man 2. They figured Raimi's name was big enough to sell-tickets, sight unseen. It turns out that people we're paying to see the Spider-man movies because they were about Spider-man, and not Sam Raimi. The ho-hum box office of DMTH combined with Raimi's apparently horrid Spider-man 4 pitch (Anne Hathaway as the Vultress? Seriously?) really shit-canned this guy's career and I think he's agreeing to take any job he can get at this point just to stay relevant. Unfortunately the projects aren't going anywhere.
-
Oct. 21, 2010, 4:35 p.m. CST
"Can't Wait to Hate", I don't think Raimi was "pandering" with
by NoDiggity
I personally did not see the Evil Dead films until AFTER I saw Drag Me To Hell, so I wasn't distracted by the winks and nods to the Evil Dead films, and I'm glad I experienced it that way. But I don't think I experienced it that way out of mere ignorance ... you can see the story as just a scary story unto itself. Eg: If you've seen Evil Dead II, then the scene of the old woman tapping her ugly fingers on Christine's desk reminds you of Ashe's chopped off hand tapping it's fingers ... but it's not there just to remind you of that, it really has a purpose other than reminding you of that. It's supposed to be our first look through Christine's eyes at this old woman that she finds gross and disgusting, and how this gives her an excuse to be cruel to her, starting her slide into Hell. If you just go HAW HAW, EVIL DEAD REFERENCE! you miss the point.
-
Christine has no eating disorder in the movie. She's on a diet, but she's on a diet out of ambition, to better herself, to have a nice life, look pretty for her boyfriend, for her boss. It's part of her ambition, the same ambition that impels her to cruelly choose to evict the old lady from her house. Thus, the avenging Demon shoves her own ambition down her throat in the form of vile substances several times. Christine has no eating disorder, she's shown pigging out on ice cream twice, and never throwing up. Her ambition causes her to crumple up a picture of herself when she was fat (which immediately brings on a demon attack). I'm just a little tired of this "bulimia" interpretation.
-
Loose remake of Night of the Demon, but quite nicely done, if you like that wacky Raimi style (and I tend to).
-
Kind of makes perfect sense to me. A bulk of the bad stuff in the film happens when she's about to eat, particularly ice cream and cakes. Her old weight is made reference to several times in the film(I doubt that would just be a coincidence...but it could be). Most of the gags involve things going in or coming out of her mouth. Even if it's not intentional theres a heck of a lot of coincidence there. Either way, its cool that such a simple movie has spawned a lot of interpretations.
-
She is introduced in the context of her diet being about ambition to better herself... we see her driving to work, practicing to get rid of her farm girl accent, resisting a window full of pastry, so she can stay thin, and we find out, as soon as she gets to work, what it's all in aid of ... her ambition to get an advanced position at her bank. Raimi said that it's about "greed" in the ambition sense, so using hunger for cakes as a stand-in for the sin of Greed makes sense, when the demons starts shoving her own "greed" down her throat, symbolically, through the varioius disgusting things poured into Christine's mouth. It's foretaste of what her "Greed" will turn into in Hell, I guess. A warning, if you will, that she ignores. As for bad thing happening before she's about to eat .... that only happens once in the movie, when she's about to eat the cake for dessert (presumably after she's had dinner) and follows her blaming her mother's alcoholism for her own failure to keep in touch with her mother. The demon appears because of her blaming her mother, not because she's about to eat dessert.
-
Both were about curses, and avoiding the curses, but Night of the Demon was about a skeptic slowly being convinced that the curse is real, and he's correct, and the curse is actually inflicted via witchcraft. Raimi's is about real demons inflicting a fake curse which is turned real by the characters's attempts to avoid it.
-
Oct. 21, 2010, 5:48 p.m. CST
Waitaminute... I thought we all hated Raimi now?
by HarryKnowlesNonExistentInceptionReview
Stop being so fuckin' fickle.
-
same writer and would scare the shit outta UFO film fans.
-
I'm pretty sure he didn't do the hair and make-up in those couple of scenes from that one Spider-Man sequel that makes idiots say that. Probably, I don't know, maybe the hair and make-up people did
-
It's horror but it's also a period piece that has lost relevance. M. Night already did a spin on this except that instead of blindness he used "invisible suicide pollen" and instead of bodysnatcher-like death (sleep is also symbolic "blindness"), he used compulsive suicide. Meh.
-
Both revolve around the mechanism of a curse that can only be removed by passing it on to a new victim. And both end up with the curse reaching its expiry time and being executed while the victim is on a railway track at a station. No way that's coincidence; it lifted key elements from NOTD. <p> I agree that the major theme of Holden's skepticism, up against the smirking assurance of Karswell's true believer, is not a part of Drag Me To Hell. <p> Hey, I've just realized that The Ring has the same curse mechanism as NOTD as well. It's a kind of offspring of NOTD and The Changeling.
-
that has never made its way to the screen. Triffids were the number-one oilseed plant in Wyndham's book; it would be good to start the film with a stockbroker who has made millions on Triffid futures. (Being an alien plant, they had no insect pests, and pushed out Earth weeds.) Raimi could have a blast with going 'Triffid green': Triffid-fuel hybrid cars, Triffid plastics, Triffid ice-cream, the works. That's the stuff the 1962 movie completely ignored.
-
Remember The Happening? That didn't go over too well with audiences now did it?
-
"johnnyrandom Oct 21st, 2010 08:39:50 AM ...Drag Me To Hell was fucking terrible. Fact." You are all a bunch of fucking retards.
-
I dug it. Wish he would do his Oz movie next, though... then Evil Dead 4
-
and not just the opening in the hospital.
-
Monkey King is right-Wyndhams book The Kraken Wakes would make an awesome movie.It would need to be updated a bit,as the 50s technology is now redundant-diving bells that get lowered on cables,etc.Also,the ending is seriously downbeat,theres no big explosions,SFX galore,and then thats the aliens whupped.Todays audiences want a crowd-pleasing ending.Also,you never actually see what the aliens look like,you just see the havoc they cause.It adds to the terror,because you cant get at the aliens as they are deep under water and have total mastery of the seas.Any ships,subs etc are instantly destroyed by the aliens superior weaponry.You cant see them,so you cant think of a way to fight them,since you dont know what they are.Todays directors with the "show all"mentality would reveal the aliens as soon as they could,thus destroying any sense of mystery and suspense.Another good one to film would be The Secret People.But I must confess that as a John Wyndham fan,Ive read most of his books-but never read The Day of The Triffids,strangely enough.Will do it soon!
-
A remake today is nothing more than replicating a few moments from the original, then filling the rest with the modern stylistic elements that make modern movies forgettable.
-
And suck it will - Sam Raimi or no Sam Raimi. No matter how many times this story is done or redone (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, et al) it will always suck. And suck hard. And suck long. And not a pleasant suck, but a suck with teeth and chewing and painful torn flesh. Fuck this movie.
Top Talkbacks
- That rumor about Sony selling SPIDER-MAN? Don't you believe it for a second! -- 423 total posts 247 posts
- Holy Crossover!! Magneto’s Boy Quicksilver To Speed About In Whedon’s AVENGERS 2 And Singer’s X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST?? -- 210 total posts 210 posts
- Papa Vinyard thinks that HANGOVER: PART III was a paycheck grab for a buncha people who are already rich!! -- 174 total posts 174 posts
- The METALLICA THROUGH THE NEVER Teaser! -- 184 total posts 118 posts
- New MAN OF STEEL trailer makes me happy that Superman has severe red eye!!! -- 786 total posts 114 posts
- Next on the Reboot assemblyline? TIMECOP!! -- 141 total posts 97 posts
- Sandler, Piss, Barf, And Hayek Grace The New GROWN UPS 2 Trailer!! -- 93 total posts 93 posts
- Green-Band and Red-Band trailers for the new Jason Sudeikis & Jennifer Aniston VACATION ripoff, WE'RE THE MILLERS are here!! -- 91 total posts 91 posts
- Seems Coppola Is Gearing Up For A New Italian-American Epic!? -- 86 total posts 86 posts
- We have some new details on the POLTERGEIST remake/reboot/sequel!! -- 206 total posts 56 posts