In 2010 Kim Jee-Woon delivered horror fans a masterful piece of cinema with his serial killer thriller I SAW THE DEVIL, and now it's headed to the States for a remake. Okay, hold on just a second. Before you go and jump off that cliff with the rest of them, there's actually a silver lining here. Adi Shankar and Spencer Silna—the producers who brought us DREDD and THE GREY—will be behind the English-language remake of the revenge tale. If a remake is going to happen at all, it might as well be in the right hands, and it appears to be so far as Shankar and Silna’s 1984 Private Defense Contractors has made a name for itself by producing a string of violent, filmmaker-driven action movies and crime thrillers.
According to them, this isn't so much a remake as it is a "port" of the original film. Here's what Shankar told The Wrap: “Kim Jee-Woon’s ’I Saw the Devil’ is perfect in so many ways. The intention is not to remake the film per se, but rather to “port” it for international audiences.” Sounds like a shot-for-shot remake to me, but is that necessarily a bad thing? Matt Reeves' LET ME IN took the same approach and that one turned out pretty good. Right now I'm skeptical, but I do think that there's a chance this could turn out to be a solid retelling as long as they keep the same focus of the original as it was a heavily character-driven film with plenty of the red stuff.