If you have seen director Breck Eisner's remake of The Crazies, you know that he's a talent to keep an eye on. Next up for him is the remake of John Carpenter's classic Escape From New York(careful now Breck!). He has also been linked to another big screen outing for Flash Gordon. But in between the two he will tackle Mark Wheatley's Vamp/Killer combo comic.
Over at Fearnet.com, they have an exclusive interview with Mark Wheatley, who reveals..
Flash Gordon is scheduled for 2012 now, I think. Escape from New York is the one he's actively working on right now. He's trying to make Blood of the Innocent the picture he does after Escape. He and the writer have been working on the pitch. The writer, Bill Marsilii, has been working on the pitch now for almost a year. But Breck came on board, I think, back in February. And so the two of them met several times and honed the pitch and worked out a "live" version of the pitch. [Laughs.] The two of them put that two-person act on the road and they've been going around to the various studios making the pitch...
..as we talked, I began to realize that gradually he was surpassing me in knowledge about the story. Because he was going out and doing a tremendous amount of research about the time period. So the thing that makes the story work – and this, by the way is research done by Rickey Shanklin, my writing partner on the book – is that the events that take place in Stoker's Dracula, date by date, mesh perfectly with the Jack the Ripper murders. That was the core of what started us off on doing the story. But Bill brought some new ideas to it, and it's pretty interesting to me, because if you read the pitch, he's kept all the action of our book, every single beat. But he changed the intent of one character, Jack the Ripper. And completely transformed the impact of the book, really improving it.
There's a lot more of the interview, be sure to head over to Fearnet to check it out. I know what everyone is thinking, another vampire movie! But that extra Jack The Ripper thing is just grabbing me attention. There is not too much info on the comic floating around the ol interweb, here is a small description..
Blood of the Innocent was one of the first American comic books to be published weekly over four weeks. It was written by Rickey Shanklin & Mark Wheatley and drawn by Marc Hempel & Mark Wheatley who had previously created the acclaimed science fiction comic Mars for First Comics. Blood of the Innocent was their first attempt at a horror comic.
The series pitted Dracula against Jack the Ripper, who in this series is a psychotic Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, in Victorian London. I'm sold!
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