He’s been keeping his cards close to his chest for a few months now, but Kevin Smith has finally opened up about the horror film his planning to make, one of two projects currently bubbling in his profanity-filled brain.
Talking to Rotten Tomatoes UK, the director revealed that he was inspired to create a very different type of horror from the current trend of torture porn by fanatical US Baptist preacher Fred Phelps, infamous for his hugely homophobic views and for picketing the funerals of US soldiers killed in Iraq.
"That dude has always fascinated me and he's really informed the horror movie that I'm working on," Smith told the site. "The movie's called Red State and it's very much about that subject matter, that point of view and that position taken to the absolute extreme. It's certainly not Phelps himself but it's very much inspired by a Phelps figure."
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But while he’s calling the project a “horror” movie, it’s not exactly what you might expect from the genre. "To me there's all kinds of horror, and killing someone's not the absolute worst thing you could do to another human being. The death in a horror movie has always been the money shot in a very exploitative manner. Stabbing somebody and splashing blood all over them is the equivalent to some dude exploding over some broad's face. And to me, too, the notion of using a Phelps-like character as a villain, as horrifying and scary as that guy can be, there's even something more insidious than him that lurks out there in as much as a public or a government that allows it and that's the other thing that I'm trying to examine in a big, big way.”
According to the director, he’s going to start penning the script in the coming months before shooting later this year. After that, he has a comedy planned for shooting in the winter. "It takes place in the middle of winter in Minnesota so we have to wait for snow.”
After bouncing back to top form with Clerks II, we’re eager to see what happens when Kev leaves his comfort comedy zone…
