By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Cover your eyes as a new version of the meta horror film heads toward production.
Producers Kiko Martínez of Nadie es Perfecto and Antonio Pérez of Maestranza Films have announced their joint production of ANGUISH, set to be directed by F. Javier Gutiérrez of the award-winning BEFORE THE FALL (a.k.a. TRES DÍAS). The original, written and directed by Bigas Luna and released in Spain in 1987 and the U.S. a year later, stars Michael Lerner as a deranged eye doctor who cuts the orbs out of his victims, under the control of his mother (POLTERGEIST’s Zelda Rubinstein). His story turns out to be a movie whose audience is terrorized by another murderer. The remake is described as “An ode to theaters in the middle of this tendency to view content at home through streamers. Cinema within cinema in a sinister Freudian parallelism between reality and fiction that is obsessed with the viewer’s gaze.”
“ANGUISH left a mark on me,” says Gutiérrez, who also helmed RINGS and was attached for a while to the long-mooted remake of THE CROW. “It is original and transgressive, hypnotic and violent, as well as a love letter to the movies and to our cinemas. It is a dream, and a responsibility, to bring back to the big screen the classic by Bigas Luna, one of Spain’s most personal and beloved authors.”
“This is one of the best and most complex horror movies in recent times,” says Pérez. “I am excited about the project, with the idea of presenting it at Cannes and I’m dying to see how Javier, with whom I worked on BEFORE THE FALL, deploys his visual talent and makes Bigas’ fascinating film his own.”
“We are delighted,” adds Martínez. “It is a groundbreaking project, unique within the genre, as Bigas’ film was in the ’80s, with a very personal stamp and incredible potential for the international market.” Sam Raimi previously announced a reboot of ANGUISH via his Ghost House Pictures back in 2009.
