I pitch Universal Monster Remakes and a new Dark Universe! – Comic Book Movie

The Dark Universe.

Well that was a major f-up wasnt it?

If you dont recall, Universal Studios has been trying to kickstart their own cinematic universe based around their classic monsters like Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolfman in the style of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Presumably, this would have led to an Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein remake starring Key and Peele.

They gave it a valiant effort with Dracula Untold, which was an attempt to make us see that historical figure Vlad The Impaler Dracula was actually a really nice guy. As elder vampire Charles Dance said at the sequel bait ending set in modern day Let the Games Begin.

The games began with The Mummy starring Tom Cruise, which despite a strong performance from Sophia Boutella was over complicated, confusing, and a failure that featured Russell Crowe doing a bad cockney accent as Mister Hyde/ this worlds Nick Fury.

Universal released this photoshopped still to promote their universe:

Tom Cruise would continue as the new mummy dearest, Johnny Depp would play the Invisible Man, Javiar Bardem would be Frankenstein, The Rock was rumored to be The Wolfman, and Angelina Jolie was going to be the Bride of Frankenstein.

So what happened?

With the failure both critically and commercially of The Mummy, all these plans were scrapped. It was back to step one. Universal decided a lower budget horror based approach with a ton of marketing and a pg-13 rating was more feasible than a big budget action spectacle version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame where Claude Frollo is a master nunchuck user.

So they passed Invisible Man off to Blumhouse and we are where we are now, with a genuinely well made, tense, and successful Invisible Man remake that brings the horror to the modern day. Stalkers are scary and an issue many women deal with, but whats scarier, an invisible stalker.

What I want to do here today is try to pitch some potential remakes that could reignite the embers of the Dark Universe while keeping things firmly in the realm of horror. I want to pitch modern updates that bring these classic horrors to the present day in ways modern audiences can fear. Lets start.

CASTING:

The Invisible Woman: Elizabeth Moss (Mad Men)

Imhotep: Alexander Siddig (Gotham)

Draculas Daughter: Saoirse Ronan (Lady Bird)

Dracula: Mads Mikkelson( Hannibal)

Van Helsing: Willem Dafoe (The Lighthouse)

Victor Frankenstein: John Hamm (Mad Men)

Igor: Macaulay Culkin (Home Alone)

Frankensteins Monster: Chiwetel Ejiofor (The Lion King)

Bride of Frankenstein: Elizabeth Debicki (Guardians of The Galaxy Volume 2)

Larry The Wolfman Talbot: Jon Bernthal(The Punisher)

Doctor Pretorius: Ian McKellan (X-Men)

The Gill Man: Andy Serkis (King Kong)

THE WOLFMAN:

The central conflict of a werewolf is the conflict between man and self. You get bitten, and you begin to fear what you will become and how you will hurt the ones you care about. The real horror this film will draw upon is the horror of child abuse. Our hero will be returning home to his family after years abroad. His father is a jerk who pitted him against his older brother and abused his mother. The hero has done everything in his power not to become his father and to be his own man. Lawrence Talbot has a wife and a son and has spent his life trying to treat them right and be a better man than his father. But now, his father is dead and hes home for the funeral, and he begins to change. He is the eldest son, the man of the house, and that means the curse is his. Lawrence Talbot is becoming all of his worst traits made manifest as a savage monster. His fathers animal spirit possesses him. He is a werewolf.

We set it in modern day in the American Northwest, its savage and violent, the effects are practical and the werewolf is a true monster in the style of The Howling or American Werewolf in London. Tension comes from Talbot trying to keep himself from losing control and hurting his family.

THE MUMMY:

Straight up horror for this, in the style of The Descent or As Above So Below. Archeology by foreigners is a bit iffy in Egypt these days on account of England stealing all their stuff and refusing to give it back so our lead character will be a native Egyptian archeologist. The fears we will be dealing with are claustrophobia, darkness, and fear of decaying corpses. The story?

An ancient tomb in Egypt, a female native Egyptian archeologist and her team of experts are going to explore it, they need to hurry though because the Taliban are in the area. The woman archeologist seems somewhat obsessive about this tomb. They go in, discovering its seemingly a labyrinth once you get inside and they get lost after a cave in because of a bomb going off on the surface. No way out but to keep going. As they continue, the Egyptian female lead discovers that something has been speaking to her in her dreams, urging her to come to this tomb and thats why shes so obsessive about it. As it turns out, she is a direct descendant of whatever is in this tomb and it is awake and alive and it has been for a long time and has been influencing her mind to try and get someone to release it. Theyre in a tomb that hasnt been opened in thousands of years and something is alive. That is scary. Also, its not a tomb at all, its a prison built by ancient Egyptians for an evil immortal sorcerer. Make it feel really claustrophobic, really dreamlike, hypnotic, and tense. The greatest strength of the mummy is that it is very smart and can get in your head. Make the movie almost Lovecraftian in nature.

The mummy itself is a malevolent inhuman intelligence that messes with our characters minds telepathically and pits them against each other. Can our heroes find another way to the surface and escape, can they defeat a force of pure evil this strong?

The most important aspect of the Mummy is that its smart, evil, and can affect you from far away. The set design should be a combination of ancient egyptian architecture as well as HR Gigers art.

CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON:

With this, we go into the most action movie feeling of these movies because the original was kind of an action movie with horror elements. The original is also in its subtext kind of a movie about man messing with nature. This one is definitely a man versus nature, fear of the unknown kind of movie. Its set in the present day, lets say the fires in the amazon rainforest have exposed evidence of fossils that depict a strange evolutionary offshoot in the Amazon. Explorers head into a world they dont understand to exploit nature and get killed off one by one by a monster. The message: dont f*** with nature or youll get killed by a crocodile man. Humanity has changed the planet by being here and now were paying the price, both with climate change and with the creature from the black lagoon. The monster is somewhat sympathetic in that it didnt come into our house, we went to its house. Its a very territorial animal defending itself. Its also terrifying. Its fast, predatory, can move through the forest with ease, is strong, a master of both land and water, it has huge claws! This thing is a perfect predator, unchanged over millions of years like a shark. Nature incarnate.

The Mummy was psychological, this will be a slasher movie with the feel of action horror films like Predator or Anaconda.

THE BRIDES OF FRANKENSTEIN:

Jon Hamm will play Doctor Victor Frankenstein, a man with a fascination for the idea of curing death, using the teachings taught to him by his old college professor Doctor Pratorius. Hes a war veteran who was a medic in the Middle East where he saved the life of Igor, though at the cost of both of Igors legs. Before he went off to war he became engaged to a woman, Elizabeth, and is going to marry her now that hes home. Its a plot point that shes always wanted to visit Europe and they plan to go on a trip someday when his work is finished. Victor is scared to see her again after years apart but Igor convinces him hell be okay. Returning home from the war he works as a doctor at a local hospital. Hes crippled by post traumatic stress disorder and guilt over those he couldnt save, which leads him to experiment on corpses with Igor helping him steal dead bodies from the hospital morgue. He has discovered he can with injected chemicals restore life in dead body parts. It works less and less well the more decayed the body is though. He hopes someday he can bring entire bodies back to life. He ends up stealing a fresh enough corpse to give Igor new legs in surgery. He is discovered and fired from the hospital. Victor has the idea to create a fully new life form and moves himself, his fianc, and Igor to his ancestral castle home in Germany, which he discovers has a secret passage leading into the cemetery through the family crypt. It would be a crime NOT TO steal these corpses with access being so easy. They learn how to un-embalm buried corpses by pumping blood back into them. He figures out a way around the decayed flesh problem and discovers that with electricity he can exercise decayed flesh and with antibiotics and moisturizing lotion rejuvenate it.

Victor builds his monster to be better than humans, unable to die, made out of the bodies of intellectuals and artists, and he uses a lightning storm to bring it to life. The monster escapes when Igor decides to torture it because Igor is secretly a psychopath. The monster runs amok, learns English after befriending a blind guy, gets chased out of the blind guys home by his visiting family who are not blind and are horrified, and accidentally kills a little girl it was trying to play with which sends a lynch mob after it. Victor believes he can save his monster and rehabilitate it as his wedding approaches.

The whole film should be Victor going too far trying to save the world, traumatized by what he saw in the war, continuing to believe in his idea, refusing to acknowledge that his friend Igor is a violent psychopath and his creation is hurting people until it all comes crashing down. Its about how trauma and loss can destroy your life.

Continued here:
I pitch Universal Monster Remakes and a new Dark Universe! - Comic Book Movie

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero