Speaking with FEARnet, Hammer head Simon Oakes discussed their upcoming films, including Matt Reeves’ Let Me in (a remake of the indie hit Let the Right One In), The Resident, and other films coming up in the company’s slate, as well as what classic Hammer properties/characters may be ripe for re-imagining, and the future outlook of the company in different media.
On Let Me In:
“…If you call it a faithful remake, I think that’s true to say that’s what it is. It’s not a reimagining; the same beats [are there], maybe the scares are a little bit more scary. We haven’t been able to ramp that up quite a lot, obviously, for budgetary reasons. We’ve played a little bit with some of the chronology, without giving too much away. Fundamentally, that’s what. High production values… [We had a] longer shooting period, more coverage, more effects…”
On Christopher Lee’s appearance in The Resident:
“It’s a cameo. Chris plays Max’s father, which is played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and it’s funny actually – when we were looking at the cast list, I was saying, we’ve got to get Christopher to be in the first Hammer picture in 37 years or whatever. 35 years or something like that. He’s called August, and it’s a small part, but it’s not stunt casting. It’s a proper part. He plays Max’s grandfather, he lives in the building in the apartment with him, and it’s great… actually I don’t want to give it away, but the reveal when you first see him is fantastic. People are going to go crazy, particularly in England…”
On the company’s direction, and other upcoming Hammer projects:
“…When I bought Hammer, this venerable British studio, which sort of invented the modern horror film in a way. And then got taken over by the urban myth films of the ‘70s like The Exorcist and The Omen, etc. I thought to myself okay, we’re going to reboot this baby. And we’re going to make it sort of relevant now for a modern audience. But what we’re going to do is we’re going to take the traits that the Hammer was famous for… In fact, with Hammer you have noticed I don’t call it “Hammer Horror”, I just call it Hammer. So it gives a, the breath to sort of do stuff that maybe we couldn’t do otherwise. And then The Woman in Black would be like The Walking Dead and The Mummy and all of that stuff that you can see in the book… we have a film called The Quiet Ones, which is about a group of scientists in the 70s, based in Cambridge. Do you remember that picture of Bill Gates with all the really crazy-brilliant people behind him, all with beards and he’s there going, ‘I don’t know,’ and that sort of incredibly iconic photograph of him with Al and all the guys. Imagine that group of people in Cambridge in the early 70s and they’re brilliant and they’re supposed to be working on DNA and working on computers and they said: ‘We’re not going to do this anymore were going to create a poltergeist.’ That’s what we are going to do. Because we are so god damn clever, we are going to do something that no one else has ever done before, and that fits into another part of Hammer’s sort of supernatural sci-fi history through Quatermass and all of those sorts of films.”
On reinventing established Hammer properties:
“…we would never remake; we might reimagine. One of the first questions that I was asked when we bought the company was are you going to remake all of those old Hammer films? Why would you do that? Because in a sense, they almost were of their time, and they sort of, almost became old-fashioned as they came up to the end of that period of time when they were making those pictures… But there were some amazing characters in here that we want to reimagine like Quatermass. Like Kronos. We’re going to do Kronos, a sort of what would he be like today? What would he look like today? Because the great thing about him of course is that he is a vampire, but not a vampire. He has all the traits of a vampire, he never ages, but he’s not a vampire. So there are so many things that you can do with that. So we have some characters in here that we are going to sort of reboot. And those are two of them. And then we’ve got a couple of other titles like The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires that we are working on; a reimagining of that. But a straight remake, no…”
On Hammer in other media:
“What we’ve done is we’ve created this new part of our business called Exclusive Labs, and what it is, it’s a part of our business, which is focusing on creating content for digital platforms, and we’re working on a couple of ideas right now. I’d love to be able to tell you, and I will make a promise that when we announce two projects very shortly, I’ll make sure that you guys get it, along with our site first, because I think it should be disseminated in our environment before it goes into what I call the traditional press. And the reason I can’t is that I’ve got a partner who wouldn’t thank me if I said something right now. But very soon, we will; we’re all trying to find out what does it mean, a digital strategy. On digital there are two things; one is distribution and one is content creation. Digital distribution is a product of the things of like the windows, VOD, television. When do you go digital? How does it cannibalize your income streams and so forth, and that’s sort of interesting and boring in equal measure. And then there’s digital content creation, which is what I’m interested in and what we’re about…”
There’s a whole lot more over at FEARnet, including Oakes’ thoughts on “torture porn,” the Twilight phenomenon, and the current ratings system. Visit the link above for the full interview!
I like that they’re not remaking all the old films, I don’t think that would have worked. I actually would like to see Kronos reimagined, I always thought the character had more movies in him than the one (which I love).