The “Nightmare on Elm Street” franchise had never been bigger following the release of the fourth installment in the series “The Dream Master,” which was then followed by a TV series titled “Freddy’s Nightmares.” New Line Cinema, which was nicknamed “The House That Freddy Built,” wasted no time ordering a fifth film with an idea that was originally pitched during pre-production on Part 3 about Freddy Krueger inhabiting the mind of an unborn child. It wasn’t until years later when producer Sara R...
Sep 28, 2022•1 hr 37 min
During the production of his hit slasher film “X,” director Ti West began developing a backstory for the character of Pearl as played by actor Mia Goth. Working together, the director and star began crafting what would ultimately become a script for an entire prequel movie that would center around the murderous woman that haunted the farm where “X” took place. Unlike that film, which took inspiration from movies like “Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” West felt like he wanted to go in a completely diff...
Sep 21, 2022•1 hr 11 min
The relationship between horror and comedy has really exploded over the last few years, especially with filmmakers like David Gordon-Green and Danny McBride developing a new “Halloween” trilogy and former sketch comedy guru Jordan Peele winning an Oscar and becoming one of the most popular directors in modern horror history. The latest convert is Zach Cregger, who first came to fame through his own sketch comedy series called “The Whitest Kids You Know.” It wasn’t until he read a book called “Th...
Sep 14, 2022•1 hr 27 min
As part of our ongoing series taking a deep dive into the entire Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, this week we look back at the 1988 sequel Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. Music courtesy of Andrew Scott Bell and Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio For more Rewind of the Living Dead, visit our website or follow on social media: https://www.rewindofthelivingdead.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/rewindofdead Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rewindoflivingdead Instagram: https://www.insta...
Sep 07, 2022•1 hr 37 min
Due to the critical failure surrounding “Nightmare on Elm Street 2,” New Line Cinema was hesitant to green light a third film in the franchise but when original creator Wes Craven decided to come back on board to help write the script, the studio decided to move forward with the project. Craven’s idea centered around a third and final film that would conclude the series, especially considering he didn’t initially plan on making any movies past the first one. His original script actually involved...
Aug 31, 2022•1 hr 37 min
The 1980s served as the home to many great horror films but it was also a decade defined by sequels, especially when any movie found success with theater goers. The immense popularity of “A Nightmare on Elm Street” in 1984 led New Line Cinema to immediately shift gears to a sequel that would ultimately be released less than a year later. Unfortunately, original director Wes Craven declined to return despite being offered the gig because he found the script by writer David Chaskin just too ridicu...
Aug 17, 2022•1 hr 18 min
Following a career that began directing x-rated films, Wes Craven decided to make the move into bigger features while combing the deepest, darkest parts of his psyche. He wrote and directed “The Last House on the Left” and “The Hills Have Eyes” — a pair of gruesome horror films that terrified audiences but also managed to essentially ostracize Craven because of the extreme content in his movies. Realizing that horror was going to be the only genre that would have him, Craven was inspired by a st...
Aug 03, 2022•1 hr 34 min
After signing a five-year development deal with Universal Pictures, Jordan Peele got to work on his next project following the massive success of both “Get Out” and “Us.” Peele’s next film was announced in November 2020 with the writer and director saying he wanted to create something audiences would have “to come see” after penning the script at a time with incredible uncertainty surrounding the future of movie theaters. Notoriously secretive about his projects, Peele didn’t reveal much of anyt...
Jul 27, 2022•1 hr 35 min
Frank Darabont had been an avid reader of Stephen King novels for quite some time when he came across the 1980 novella called “The Mist” as part of the “Dark Forces” anthology. Darabont immediately fell in love with the story and decided to adapt King’s book into a film that would become his directorial debut. What ultimately happened was Darabont made another King novella into a film with “The Shawshank Redemption” followed by yet another story called “The Green Mile.” Finally in 2004, Darabont...
Jul 21, 2022•1 hr 30 min
Back in 2004, Joe Hill was a struggling novelist who just couldn’t seem to get one his books purchased by a publisher. Despite being horror icon Stephen King’s son, Hill was determined to strike out on his own, which is why he changed to a different last name from his father. Rather than write another novel, Hill decided to develop a group of short stories into a single collection with one of the stories centered around a little boy who gets kidnapped and he escapes thanks to help from a superna...
Jul 13, 2022•1 hr 13 min
A supersized group of episodes of “Stranger Things” combined with delays in production due to the pandemic led to season 4 being split into two separate parts with the first seven episodes dropping in May and then the final two debuting in July. Despite only two episodes remaining in the season, “Stranger Things” packed a lot into these episodes with a nearly four-hour run time that helped reach a conclusion leading into the fifth and final season of the show. When we left at the end of episode ...
Jul 05, 2022•1 hr 21 min
When writers S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock were working as editors for the United States Navy while helping to produce educational videos, they had a thought while standing on top of a boulder in the middle of the desert — what if there was something underground that prevented them from actually getting off this rock? That spawned an idea for a monster movie about creatures that swim around under the dirt. The original working title was “Land Sharks” but that had to change thanks to a “Saturday ...
Jun 22, 2022•1 hr 6 min
When John Carpenter was first contacted about potentially directing a remake of the 1951 classic “The Thing from Another World,” he was reluctant to sign onto the project. The studio had already hired and fired “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” director Tobe Hooper and Carpenter didn’t really see a path to a creative remake from a film he admired so much. But it was his first chance to move from independent cinema to do a studio film so Carpenter eventually decided to take on the project while putting h...
Jun 16, 2022•1 hr 23 min
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean something isn’t really happening. That’s the premise behind the new film “Watcher,” which just opened in theaters as director Chloe Okuno teams up with “It Follows” star Maika Monroe for a thriller that feels like something that should have Alfred Hitchcock’s name attached to it. In addition to “Watcher” opening in theaters, David Cronenberg’s latest film called “Crimes of the Future” is also being released with the reception to this latest movie mixed s...
Jun 08, 2022•1 hr 26 min
Horror has always found a home on television but it’s hard to imagine anything capturing the attention of the pop culture zeitgeist like “Stranger Things” has done over the past few years. Developed by the Duffer brothers, the series based in the 1980’s was equal parts nostalgia and great storytelling while making titles like Eleven and the Demogorgon household names across the globe. When “Stranger Things” season 3 ended, the evil Mindflayer had been stopped but Eleven lost her powers and the g...
Jun 01, 2022•1 hr 35 min
The wild success of the first Friday the 13th movie had Paramount Pictures frothing at the mouth for a sequel but the initial idea was to essentially treat the franchise as an anthology where each movie would involve an entirely new scary story. Some of the producers on the original film had a much different idea that the sequel should involve Jason Voorhees even though his appearance in the original film was essentially done in a nightmare sequence that was never expected to go any further than...
May 13, 2022•1 hr 25 min
Writing partners Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski had already managed to get several scripts made into films but there was plenty more left on the cutting room floor from projects that never got picked up or pieces of stories that were deemed too ambitious that the pair called their “murdered darlings.” Armed with those ideas along with an intense desire to write something that would scare each other, Collins and Piotrowski started to develop an idea for a new script that would deal with a subjec...
May 12, 2022•1 hr 15 min
When writer and director Miriama Diallo attended Yale University, she referred to the person in charge of her residential college as ‘master’ — an incredibly outdated term that the school tried to explain away as nothing more than a way to pay homage to a British system on which it was based while stating it had nothing to do with the ugly history of slavery in America. Diallo just went along with the university’s rules but a few years after she graduated, she happened to run into the former hea...
Apr 28, 2022•1 hr 17 min
Combining a modern tale of terror with a 1980s video game, first-time director Toby Meakins and writer Simon Allen decided to tackle a horror film that feels like it’s one part ‘Jumanji’ and another part ‘Black Mirror.’ The premise centers around a down-on-her-luck computer programming enthusiast named Kayla, who cleans buildings at night to help support her family, as they continue to grieve the loss of her little brother. When she’s not working, Kayla is hanging out with Isaac — another comput...
Apr 20, 2022•1 hr 13 min
As she prepared to direct her first solo feature, future Oscar winner Kathryn Bigelow wanted to film a Western movie but she found it difficult to secure financing and a studio to back up her vision. So alongside co-writer Eric Red, who also penned the horror film “The Hitcher,” Bigelow shifted gears to combine her idea for a modern Western with the vampire genre that had become increasingly popular in recent years, especially after the success of “Fright Night” as well as another film called “T...
Apr 13, 2022•1 hr 17 min
With ownership over the entire “Spider-Man” catalog and the characters surrounding the friendly neighborhood webslinger, Sony announced plans to develop several new films that would branch out and expand the whole universe. Following the surprising success around “Venom,” the studio moved swiftly to begin developing even more projects including one centered around Morbius The Living Vampire — a character that started out as a villain and eventually became more of an anti-hero in recent years. Id...
Apr 06, 2022•1 hr 23 min
Thanks to the reception from their first film titled “Patchwork,” writers Tyler MacIntyre and Chris Lee Hill were commissioned to rework a script that had similar overtones as a horror-comedy with female leads. They eventually got inspired to transform the script into a slasher movie but MacIntyre and Hill wanted to tackle the project from a different angle than the typical point-of-view from the victims and instead put the killers in the driver’s seat. Eventually they wrote a scene that took pl...
Mar 30, 2022•1 hr 17 min
Director Ti West had made several horror films throughout his career but he got to a point where he felt like he said all he needed to say in the genre. Following a nearly 10-year-long break, West finally got inspired to return after realizing that he had never made a slasher movie but he was still trying to find the right idea that would inspire him to make another horror film. As a lifelong fan of filmmakers and filmmaking, West took inspiration from that for his next feature. But rather than ...
Mar 23, 2022•1 hr 12 min
A less than enthusiastic reaction to 2002’s “Halloween: Resurrection” left the famous horror franchise in limbo as producers tried to figure out the best way to go forward. Numerous scripts were produced that included Michael Myers facing off with the Cenobites from “Hellraiser,” another featuring the return of Jamie Lloyd and even one that would serve as a prequel of sorts to take place during the events of “Halloween III: Season of the Witch.” Ultimately, Dimension Films reached out to rock st...
Mar 16, 2022•1 hr 39 min
Writer Lauryn Kahn grew up loving horror movies so she was very excited for the chance to actually make one of her own. When she was looking for inspiration, a friend who had previously written a horror film said that she based the script around “the scariest thing” possible for her. That gave Kahn the idea to write her story from the female perspective in the world of dating while also addressing the fears that women deal with everyday like something so seemingly mundane like walking to their c...
Mar 09, 2022•1 hr 21 min
Throughout the 1980s, the “Nightmare on Elm Street” film series was one of the most popular horror franchises with fans regularly flocking to the theaters to see what new group of teenagers would be sliced and diced in their dreams by the demonic Freddy Krueger. After three films with a fourth on the way, New Line Cinema — the studio that produced the “Nightmare on Elm Street” films — decided to take a stab at bringing Freddy to the small screen by developing a new series based around the popula...
Mar 02, 2022•1 hr 5 min
There’s never been a shortage of ideas when it came to making more sequels, reboots or remakes of Tobe Hooper’s 1974 classic “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” but the latest incarnation didn’t start taking shape until 2018 when Legendary Pictures obtained the rights to the iconic horror franchise. Following the success of his “Evil Dead” remake along with the breakout hit “Don’t Breathe,” Fede Alvarez got interested in the project and signed on as a producer with newcomer Chris Thomas Devlin handli...
Feb 22, 2022•1 hr 53 min
After he got car-jacked near his home in South London, future writer and director Joe Cornish started to wonder what would have happened if a meteor fell from the sky and came crashing down to the ground at the same time he was being robbed. How would that change the dynamic of that situation? Cornish believed that he would probably turn to his tormentors to ask them to have his back in such an unpredictable and potentially dangerous moment. That spawned an idea for Cornish, who had grown up adm...
Feb 17, 2022•1 hr 26 min
Jordan Peele will release his new movie on July 22 but the first trailer for his upcoming horror film "Nope" dropped on Sunday and Rewind of the Living Dead is going to react to the footage on this special podcast. What kind of anticipation is there surrounding Peele's latest film after he won an Oscar for "Get Out" and then followed that up with "Us"? Listen to this special episode to find out everything we know about "Nope" and what was revealed in the trailer. Music courtesy of Andrew Scott B...
Feb 13, 2022•33 min
There have been hundreds of different takes on vampires on television and film but writer and director Chris Baugh had never seen anything set against the backdrop of his home in Northern Ireland. That’s why he decided to take a stab at a script based around his home country but while everybody knows that “Dracula” author Bram Stoker is Irish, there’s far less knowledge surrounding the influence an ancient Irish legend supposedly had on him while writing one of the definitive horror novels in hi...
Feb 10, 2022•1 hr 6 min
