News
‘The Legend of Halloween’ Co-Author Onur Tukel on Re-Imagining a Classic
It’s been just over a year since Onur Tukel and David Gordon Green first conceived of The Legend of Halloween, a “children’s book” adaptation of John Carpenter’s classic 1978 Halloween starring Jamie Lee Curtis. Tukel had seen that original film when he was nine years old, and it has remained a constant favorite for him since that time, and when he discovered his friend David was working on a trilogy of sequels, he reached out to see if he could spend some time on set.
“David’s a generous guy and he knew how much it meant to me to be part of it,” Tukel told iHorror in a recent interview. “When I was 22 or so, the first thing I ever shot on super 8 was a grainy black and white fan-film called Michael Myers Meets His Match. It was 25 years ago in Wilmington, NC. When I went to visit the set of Halloween Kills in 2019, they were shooting a scene in the same park I’d shot in 25 years earlier. It was surreal and beautiful.”
While working on Halloween Kills Tukel discovered that Green, like himself, loved to write little rhymes and verses and with accompanying drawings and together they produced a small volume titled It’s Halloween in Haddonfield, which they gifted to the cast and crew. Still, they wanted to do more, and specifically, they wanted to do something for the fans. They came up with a concept called The Legend of Halloween which would retell the classic first film in an illustrated children’s book format.
Green pitched the idea to producers Malek Akkad and Ryan Friemann who loved the idea and the co-authors went to work on the project in Spring of this year.
They had no idea, at the time, but they truly had their work cut out for them. Not only did they have to find a meter and rhythm for the story, but they also had to determine what they could and could not bring in from the film.
“There are so many singular scenes in Halloween, but we just couldn’t include everything,” he explained. “So that was tough. There’s that great shot of Laurie looking out the classroom window and seeing the Shape watching her across the street. That’s not in the book. We knew there was certain things we could never capture from the original film, like the dread and portent of Loomis and Brackett exploring the Myers house. But we had fun figuring out how to adapt the movie in a way that diehard fans would enjoy. We wanted the book to have playful homages without blatantly copying the visuals of the movie. And of course, like the movie, we wanted the violence to be tasteful.”
What emerged was something that looked and felt to Tukel like an amalgamation of John Carpenter, Shel Silverstein, Charles Shulz, and Jules Feiffer and yet was somehow totally their own.
“We wanted it to be tasteful, with very little blood (like the original), but again, we wanted it to be just naughty enough that a youngster would get some subversive pleasure in reading it,” Tukel said.
While an official release date hasn’t been announced, The Legend of Halloween will no doubt be available sometime soon, and of course the author hopes the book is a success, but even if it isn’t, he says the experience was incredible.
“I hope the book has the success that the first movie had, of course,” he said. “I hope it sells 10 million copies and goes on to the be the most successful independent children’s book ever written! I hope the fans eat it up and demand another one and another one and we just keep making more. But if that doesn’t happen, I gotta say that I’m just happy this weird little book exists. Halloween is my favorite horror film, David’s one of my favorite directors, and to be part of something this unexpected is a dream come true.”
For more information on The Legend of Halloween, visit their OFFICIAL WEBSITE and look for this one-of-a-kind book coming to a bookstore near you!
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Movies
‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening
Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.
Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.
Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.
Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.
Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.
The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.
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News
Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date
Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.
Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.
These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:
According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”
Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.
Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.
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Movies
Trailer for ‘The Exorcism’ Has Russell Crowe Possessed
The latest exorcism movie is about to drop this summer. It’s aptly titled The Exorcism and it stars Academy Award winner turned B-movie savant Russell Crowe. The trailer dropped today and by the looks of it, we are getting a possession movie that takes place on a movie set.
Just like this year’s recent demon-in-media-space film Late Night With the Devil, The Exorcism happens during a production. Although the former takes place on a live network talk show, the latter is on an active sound stage. Hopefully, it won’t be entirely serious and we’ll get some meta chuckles out of it.
The film will open in theaters on June 7, but since Shudder also acquired it, it probably won’t be long after that until it finds a home on the streaming service.
Crowe plays, “Anthony Miller, a troubled actor who begins to unravel while shooting a supernatural horror film. His estranged daughter, Lee (Ryan Simpkins), wonders if he’s slipping back into his past addictions or if there’s something more sinister at play. The film also stars Sam Worthington, Chloe Bailey, Adam Goldberg and David Hyde Pierce.”
Crowe did see some success in last year’s The Pope’s Exorcist mostly because his character was so over-the-top and infused with such comical hubris it bordered on parody. We will see if that is the route actor-turned-director Joshua John Miller takes with The Exorcism.
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