Coming on the heels last weekend’s announcement of a Nightmare on Elm Street ongoing series by Chuck Dixon and Kevin West, Fridayat Comic-Con DC/Wildstorm announced they will also publish titles based on the Friday the 13th and Texas Chainsaw Massacre horror film series.
Coming in January 2007 is Friday the 13th, written by the prolific team of Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti, with the ever-popular interior artist “TBD”, with Ryan Sook on art and variant covers by Tim Bradstreet.
A month before, Texas Chainsaw Massacre by another writing team of Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, with pencils by Wesley Craig and covers by Lee Bermejo and Bradstreet, premieres, coinciding with Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, the upcoming motion picture from New Line.
According to Wildstorm editor Ben Abernathy, the approach he’s taking with all three series is to “dig” back into their "horror" roots and, “Move away from the ‘slasher-gorefest’ they each became in later franchise editions. “It's going to be a challenge in channeling that terror from the original films into comic book form, but I think people are going to be really surprised (and scared!) with the results!”
We also caught up with a few of the creators to see if their visions matched their editors.
” I love horror movies. Love them,” offered Justin Gray, co-writer of Friday. “Friday the 13th is a classic example of the slasher genre with roots in the Italian Giallo style of cinema as applied to horny American teenagers. I for one don't particularly enjoy remakes so the attitude going into this was to find the core elements of the franchise, the stuff that really worked and find a way to make it work again without producing a thinly veiled comicbook adaptation of a movie that is sixteen years-old. These characters became myths and that's what interests us in this project. That and the bloody parts.
“Right away we told Ben and Scott [Dunbier] that we wanted to get back to the roots of what made the first two films so memorable. They felt the same way about it, which was cool. It is great when you can all be on the same page about a property like this. As the 13th franchise progressed it moved away from the horror and sold itself solely on Jason and the gore factor. The same thing happened with Freddy. With Friday we want to explore more ideas about the camp and the lake, but that's all I'm going to say for now.”
Dixon echoed the “back to the roots” tone. “The first Nightmare movies had so much promise and so much more to be explored,” he said, “I've paced my initial arcs far more like the first three Freddy movies.”
”With Texas Chainsaw Massacre, our job is to produce a comic that delivers a direct sequel to the recent blockbuster remake (with prequel on the way)”, replied Abnett and Lanning. “Of course, our soul and inspiration is the original, one of the purest and most iconic horror films ever made.”
We also asked each creators how they plan translate horror – often so reliant on the “bathroom mirror” technique of shock the audience [where the character closes the bathroom mirror that's on an angle, to reveal the nemesis on the background] – to the comic book page.
“You're talking about cheap horror, the kind of thing where someone or some creature jumps out at you-or worse a cat!” responded Gray. “As a viewer I'm bored with that gimmick. Horror should inspire dread in the reader or viewer. In comics, you're not going to get that kind of jump out of your seat moment, but what you can get, and what is infinitely more terrifying is a sense of helplessness. “One thing that makes zombie films or something like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Donald Sutherland version) so unnerving is a sense of claustrophobia and the psychology behind it. You cannot escape your doom no matter how slowly it moves toward you. That's something you can do on paper. There are other techniques but we're saving them for the book.”
“The Nightmare stories actually lend themselves to comics quite well,” said Dixon. “I can use many of the same tricks the filmmakers used by juxtaposing the world of dreams and nightmares with waking reality. Is the character awake or sleeping? If sleeping, then what will they find when they awaken. Comics also lend themselves more to the mystery and problem-solving that are often shunted aside in the movies for more gore gimmicks. “Freddy's treated more like an urban legend; believed in only by a kind of underground culture of doomed teens. I play more with the slow reveal and don't bring everything about Freddy to center stage all at once.”
“I think we can pull a few shocks, a few cinematic moves,” said “DnA”. “But real horror is psychological. We aim to blend in ideas that will keep you awake at night. Suspense, tension, surprises, twists, all tied together with an almost documentary tone of realism that will make the shattering circumstances all the more distressing when they play out. Like the way Tobe Hooper’s original “Chainsaw” did, in the first place.
“Texas Chainsaw Massacre is going to match the feel of the film - gritty, unglamorous, ultra-real. ‘TCM’ is the most ‘real world’ of all these titles, lacking as it does any supernatural element. Our book is going to be about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, together with the eerie, feral, abnormal atmosphere of the location. What would it be like to be there, in the early 70’s, as a cop or a reporter, say, having to go into the Travis County backwater to investigate that awful crime? What would it feel like? What would they find? Would you be waiting for them there, unwilling to give up any secrets, or let anybody go?”
[note: Wildstorm did not offer any information when asked the circumstances of obtaining the rights to these properties, when Avatar announced titles based on these films last year. Look for updates on that front when and if we get them.]
Dr. Gore
Originally Posted by BerringerX
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