Tyler Perry and Blumhouse founder Jason Blum are both incredibly successful producers in their own right, and now they’re teaming up for a mysterious new project titled Help, Deadline reports. Details on Help are being kept under wraps, but we know it’s a thriller and it’s being written and directed by Alan McElroy (sometimes credited as Alan B. McElroy), a genre regular who wrote both the 2003 version of Wrong Turn and its 2021 reboot.
McElroy earned his first screen credit by writing the script for Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers in 1988. Since then, his credits have included writing the TV movies Murder by Night and Wheels of Terror, the Brandon Lee action movie Rapid Fire, a couple different entries in the action franchise The Marine, the Netflix thriller Fractured, and multiple episodes of Star Trek: Discovery. He served as executive story editor on The Vampire Diaries, and also developed the well-received animated series Todd McFarlane’s Spawn after writing the poorly received Spawn live-action movie.
Help will be filming at Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta, Georgia sometime next year.
Perry and Blum are producing Help alongside Tim Palen, who shares the Peachtree and Vine label with Perry.
This is one of those secretive projects where you have to gauge your interest in it based entirely on the names of the people bringing it to the screen. For me, the fact that Help is being written and directed by Alan McElroy is already enough to get me interested in it, because I have been following his career ever since being impressed by Halloween 4 when I was a kid. To finish the script for Halloween 4 before the writers guild went on strike, McElroy had to knock out the first draft in just 11 days. The result is my favorite sequel in the Halloween franchise.