Ian Kessner, writer/director of the recently released slasher LOST AFTER DARK, and his co-writer Bo Ransdell obviously have an affection for the 1980s, having even gone so far as to set their movie in the ’80s. In an interview with Nerd Report, the pair revealed that they’re still keeping one foot thirty years in the past while looking ahead to the future of their careers: not only is there hope for a sequel to LOST AFTER DARK, they’re also trying to put together a reboot of Anthony Hickox’s 1988 film WAXWORK.
WAXWORK starred Zach Galligan, Deborah Foreman, Michelle Johnson, Dana Ashbrook, and David Warner, and tells the following story:
Inside the wax museum, a group of teenagers are aghast at the hauntingly lifelike wax displays of Dracula, the Wolfman, the Mummy, and other charter members of the horror Hall of Fame. Eash display is perfectly grotesque, yet each is missing one thing… a victim! Admission to the Waxwork was free, but now they may pay with their lives! One by one, the students are drawn into the settings as objects of the blood-thirsty creatures. They are now part of the permanent collection.
Basically, if you cross the exhibition barrier rope at the waxwork, you’re transported into a dimension where the scene depicted in wax is actually reality. This allowed Hickox to pack scenes with werewolves, vampires, zombies, and the Marquis de Sade all into the same film, and the chance to work in multiple sub-genres at once is part of the appeal for Kessner and Ransdell.
Kessner says,
It’s got a Something Wicked This Way Comes vibe where the waxwork appears in town overnight. It’s really fun. It’s also an opportunity for us to play in a whole bunch of horror genres, kind of an anthology where the characters keep falling into these different vignettes or the different worlds where they tackle different horror tropes, and they tackle the best parts of it, the climax. So it’s really fun for us if we get to make it because we get to explore all these different genres within the horror, sort of like Cabin in the Woods.
Ransdell adds that the duo are working on this project with the blessing of Hickox (who also made the 1992 sequel WAXWORK II: LOST IN TIME), and the blessing of the creator is always a good thing to have.
There have been rumblings of a WAXWORK re-do for a while, with Hickox having told Fangoria in 2008 that one of the producers was keen on getting a remake off the ground, but that progress was hampered by an inharmonious relationship between the original’s backers. Perhaps things have been worked out in the seven years since.
WAXWORK is a really fun movie, with a concept that more could be done with. I haven’t seen LOST AFTER DARK yet, so I’m not familiar with Kessner and Ransdell’s style, but I think a remake/reboot/re-whatever of WAXWORK has a lot of potential.