John Dies At The End: The Movie

What feels like ages ago, I wrote a short bit on the David Wong book John Dies At The End, and while I feel I couldn't quite capture what I liked so much about the book in writing, it'll have to do. The reason I'm bringing it up again is because, as I mentioned, I had heard rumors that Don Coscarelli was working on a movie. Of course, my long and bountiful... well, long, career as a nerd have taught me one thing, not to get overly excited as to rumors such as these. At this point, it's very tempting to go on a little rant about Guilermo Del Toro and At The Mountains Of Madness, but this isn't the time. This is the time for discussing actual tangible evidence that Coscarelli is making this happen, yes, a trailer. 

So yes, that will probably seem pretty incomprehensible to anyone who haven't read the book, but from what I can see, it seems very faithful to the original. As a fan of the book, I'm pretty excited about this, but it could also backfire, there are some parts of it that might not work as a complete transplant. I'm interested to see how they do the pacing, since the book was a mite unusual in the dramaturgical department, but at least there's an escalation all in all.

As I mentioned in my initial post, I believe the story is very much in good hands, since JDATE seems like a story that Coscarelli could do well with. The Quirk-To-Serious ratio kind of reminds me of Bubba Ho-Tep, a story of an aging Elvis and a wheelchair-bound, dark-skinned John F. Kennedy (or two old men convinced they are Elvis and JFK, depending on your interpretation) fighting a mummy in an old folks home, only replacing the melancholy of Ho-Tep with my favorite filling, horror. The horror elements also seem similar to his most famous film, Phantasm, being some less bleak version of cosmic horror with a strong focus on how knowing or seeing certain things will attract attention you really don't want.

So, here's hoping this thing pans out well.

ZOMGbie

Today's entry was going to be about something entirely different, but I suddenly stumbled across an interesting piece of news that really pushed my fanboy button. Originally, I was planning to write about interesting horror litterature, including my newfound love for the works of a certain Mr. Lovecraft. However, when I did some research on the book World War Z, among others double-checking the name of the author because that's incredibly embarrasing to mess up in a blog, I learned that there is a silver screen treatment of WWZ in the works.

World War Z is written by Max Brooks, the man who wrote The zombie survival guide, and as the title and previous works implies, it's about our favorite shambling piles of reanimated flesh. World War Z is somewhat unique in that it tells the typical zombie story from the point of view of the people who survived it.

The one thing that worries me, except for a slight chance for running zombies, is that the book is narrated in such a way that making it into a traditional hollywood flick would be nothing short of a lovecraftian nightmare. One hopes that the film is made, like the book, heavily flashback-based. Now that I think about it, there's actually several things that can go wrong, for example shifting the unique focus of the book, that being how the Zombie crisis wrecked all of the world, rather than, like most zombie movies, just focusing on how the Americans, or in some cases the Brits, are faring.

There's not really all that much more I know, hope or fear about this movie, except that I know it'll be about zombies, I hope it'll be awesome and I fear it will be full of fail. While waiting for more details to be released, feel free to check out this script preview and/or wait in eager expectation.