Black Gate

The Blair Witch Project Cast: Heather, Mike and Josh

I have long since been an awed admirer of the genius behind The Blair Witch Project (1999). With a production budget of around $60K the film grossed nearly $250M: roughly a return of 4000x. Considering a movie is labeled “blockbuster” if it returns 3x The BWP was a flipping phenomenon. Not to mention the writers/directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez kicked the project off while they were still film students at University of Central Florida, and the three 20-year-old stars, Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard, who showed up at an open casting call, had never acted in a movie. It also introduced us to the concept of a “found footage” film.

Unbelievable, “lightning strike” kind of success.

With 2024 being the 25th anniversary of BWP, I assumed there would be some press attention in various forms, though this particular form wasn’t what I was expecting.

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If you just sang the title, we can definitely be friends.

There has been Hollywood buzz for more than five years about whether or not a movie version of Stephen King’s 1983 novel Christine would be getting remade. Finally, in June 2021, our favorite horror production company, Blumhouse (The Invisible Man, Black Phone, Insidious), announced they were in, and a script was in development. At that time, King had been on a tear with the success of IT and IT: Chapter 2, not to mention a reboot of Pet Sematary, and by December of that year King was reading over a draft script for a new Christine. However, by February 2022 King was going on the record as saying he had cooled on the idea of a Christine remake.

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The found-footage short Exposure, now available on YouTube

I dearly love guerilla marketing.

The formal definition of guerilla marketing is a marketing strategy that uses unconventional methods to attract interest in a brand or business through viral social media messaging, and the master of this approach in my opinion is J.J. Abrams. For his films Super 8 and Coverfield, Abrams sent fans on Easter egg hunts through fake commercials and misdirected websites. LinkedIn even wrote an article about it, and at the time I thought it was just about the coolest way to generate buzz for a film, which I had ever encountered.

Whether or not this is what writer/director Kris J. Cummins intends with his latest horror short is unknown, but he is definitely generating online buzz.

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I’ve spent more words here than I care to count ranting about the atrocities Universal Studios has repeatedly tried to visit on its iconic monster movie catalog. I could dry heave every time I think about the whole Dark Universe debacle and the fact that we were this close to having a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde courtesy of Russell Crowe, a Van Helsing brought to you by Channing Tatum, Dwayne “the rock” Johnson as Wolfman, and (I can barely type this) Angelina Jolie recreating the Bride of Frankenstein. Literally, the only good thing I can say about the first step in this hellish march to mediocrity that was Tom Cruise in The Mummy (2017), is that its spectacular crash and burn lit fire to the entire concept.

But here we are in 2024 and a mere year away from the launch of Universal’s new Epic Universe theme park, part of which is a new “land” called – you guessed it – Dark Universe. Sources point to plans for the new park being in the works since the early 2000’s, and scuttling the big-budget remakes of their classic monster films meant Universal was left with a revenue gap that tied their new park property to their movie vault. The answer, when it finally started being talked about at Hollywood cocktail parties, is a classic example of the best ideas being the original ones.

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If you hang around here often, then you know we here at Goth Chick News love a good indie horror film, and if it comes to us via Daniel Katz, David Fenkel, and John Hodges, aka the independent film company A24, we love it even more. Founded a mere thirteen years ago, A24 has been a juggernaut in the horror industry with such titles as The Witch (2015), Hereditary (2018), Midsommer (2019), and Talk to Me (2023). In all, A24 has cranked out an incredible 156 movies across multiple genres, but it has been horror that has gained them the most mainstream attention.

Considering the creativity of A24 titles, it seems almost inevitable that current headlines would eventually provide source material. Most A24 plots have a deeper social commentary anyway, but their current outing is incredibly interesting on a few levels. Civil War, from writer-director Alex Garland (28 Days Later, Dredd, Ex Machina), represents a fairly risky venture for our favorite indie company.

Allow me to explain.

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The Lost Boys (Warner Bros, 1987)

In the constantly evolving world of pop culture the horror genre, like fashion, cycles through which monsters or tropes are currently in vogue. In the dark era from 2000-2010 we lived through sparkly vampires thanks to the Twilight books and subsequent movies. From 2010-2014 it was all about zombies due to the height of Walking Dead fandom and from 2015-2020 we had a run on jump scares and final-girls, while overlapping those last couple of years were a lot of slasher/serial killers. Of course, these subgenres weren’t alone during these timespans, but every so many years Hollywood seems to turn its attention to one specific monster more often than others.

Considering how shafted vampires got the last time it was their turn, it seems only fitting that this time around they are being portrayed as nature intended. Both big and small screen offerings like Blood Red Sky (2021), Midnight Mass (2021), The Invitation (2022) and The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023) have returned to depicting vampires as dark-needing, dirt-sleeping, human-eating, bringers of terror – which is how things should be. The only way this depiction gets better is when vampires are all of the above, as well as being really great to look at. And for that we need to go back to the 80’s.

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You likely don’t know I have a day job in the tech industry where I have funded all my macabre obsessions for more years than I care to count. Like nearly everyone these days, my company is in a frenzy over artificial intelligence (AI) and all the cool ways we can/will use it. Through said day job, I also have access to the most current generative AI engine which got me to thinking whether or not this technology would eventually do me out of my Black Gate side hustle? Could AI create my GCN content in a seamless undetectable way, thereby effectively Cyberdyne’ing the whole BG staff out of existence? I decided to give it a go.

I had planned on the topic of this week’s article being a new big-screen offering scheduled to land in theaters on April 19 entitled Abigail. Entering all the appropriate links and prompts into the AI engine, I held my breath for the few seconds it took to return a response.

My initial reaction was dismay. AI’s article looked to be about the right length and was interspersed with visually interesting graphics. Remembering that I had pointed the AI engine toward my content, asking it to mimic the style and “voice” of my previous work, I had a moment of panic wondering, “Is this technology actually me, only better?”

The answer, at least for now, is thankfully no.

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Back in July of last year, I wrote a cautiously optimistic piece about Guillermo del Toro working on his own adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I say “cautiously” because as part of that article I also provided a Wikipedia page dedicated to del Toro’s “unrealized projects,” (30 by the way) which was a nice way of listing out all the times he ghosted us. Ironically, this list included Frankenstein. Since that time there has been a lot of back and forth, specifically regarding the strike by writers and actors, and whether or not those would kill del Toro’s film, or at the very least delay it right back into an “unrealized project.”

However, on January 7th, Deadline reported that Jacob Elordi whose movie career took off last year with starring roles in Priscilla and Saltburn, will take over the role of Frankenstein’s iconic monster in the del Toro treatment; a role that had been long rumored as going to actor Andrew Garfield. Deadline also reported that filming was getting underway in February (confirmed by a tweet from del Toro), possibly in Scotland where del Toro had been spotted off and on since 2022, at various sites in and around Edinburgh.

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