Sony’s horror label Screen Gems is back on campus. This time we’re adding a twist to the digital age. The 1998 urban legend reboot is officially under development, with Annabelle author Gary Dauberman trying to create a modern slash through his coin manipulation banner.
As the Hollywood Reporter first reported, Shana La Wakefield (The Red Killer) is on board to write the script, and former producer Neil Moritz reportedly is speaking.
The plot details remain under the rap, but the new film explores how urban legends evolve in a digital, social media-driven world. That premise opens the door to the scope of modern folk tales, from Creepypasta-style tales to viral ticutok horror.
The first “Urban Legend”
Directed by Australian film director Jamie Blanks (Valentine) and written by Silvio Halta (The Ugly Betty), the original urban legend follows the masked killer who takes students from the University of New England. The cast included a lineup of rising stars of the time: Jared Leto, Alicia Witt, Joshua Jackson, Tara Reid, Rebecca Gayheart, Michael Rosenbaum.
Blank had an interesting path to overseeing urban legends. He first circling Scream (at the time entitled Scary Movie) but lost the manager’s chair to Wes Craven. He then decided to send a script to know what you did last summer and prove his chop by using only $3,000 and a few friends to create a mock trailer. He didn’t land the job, but the trailer impressed enough producers to provide him with urban legends a few months later.
Released in the wake of Scream and knows what you did last summer, but the film didn’t work with critics. It holds a score of 30% on Rotten Tomatoes, with the audience behind 37%. Still, it proved to have been successful at the box office, earning more than US$72 million on a budget of US$14 million. Two sequels followed. Urban Legend: Final Cut (2000) and Urban Legend: Bloody Mary (2005).
Another stab wound
This is not the first attempt at a reboot of the city legend. A new version was previously announced in 2020, with Colin Minihan (Grave Encounters) registered directly. These plans have quietly fallen apart during the pandemic. Interestingly, the IMDB profile of Minihan is attached as the writer and director of the pre-production urban legend project, but does not mention Wakefield, who was named Minihan and the new screenwriter in the THR report, so this credit could be a wreckage of what happened before.
Now with Nun’s writer Dauberman, executive producer of Nun films, the Annabelle writer has returned home to be co-writer/producer of the newly released adaptation of The Newly Releasion Till The Dawn. And as Scream Franchise is New Wave and fresh I know what you did with last summer’s entry, urban legends can be perfectly poised for a modern slash revival. stay tuned.
