The 1980s horror film Spookies was a notoriously troubled production. Filming began in 1984 with Brendan Faulkner and Thomas Doran at the helm… but then creative and legal issues arose during post-production, so that version of the film (which was going by the title Twisted Souls) was never completed. Instead, an investor hired Eugenie Joseph to shoot new footage – involving a different cast and a lot more monsters – that was then mixed together with the footage left over from Faulkner and Doran. This mish-mash was released under the title Spookies in 1987, and over the decades it has developed a cult following. And that cult is now so large, Spookies producer/co-writer Frank Farel is moving ahead with Spookies 2!
Farel dropped the sequel news into an interview with The Barrens Hideout Podcast at the Dark Arts Festival in Lincoln, Rhode Island last weekend. He said (with thanks to our friends at Bloody Disgusting for the transcription), “Remarkably, [Spookies] has done well enough in its revival that I’m at the start of raising financing for a sequel. I’m hoping to get a couple of name horror actors into it. I’m also looking to make a film that is almost an anti-sequel. I don’t just want to rehash what was done the first time. I don’t want to even make a typical sequel. I want to make something that’s an animal of its own. It’s different in so many ways. The way I’m doing it, it’s almost intended as a mockery of what happened to our original film.“
Farel admitted that he hated the original Spookies because “it was not our film. It was sort of taken apart and reassembled. It was just not the film we had made. We did not like anything about what was done to it.” Despite that, the script for Spookies 2 is “a love letter to the fans who have made it possible to make another Spookies movie simply because they responded so positively to the first one.“
The first Spookies (which, by the way, was shown on a memorable episode of The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs a few years ago) has the following synopsis: After their car breaks down, a group of travelers finds themselves stranded in a remote part of New England. When they take shelter in a spooky old mansion, complete with a graveyard, they discover a Ouija board and decide to spend the night attempting to summon some spirits. But the group soon learns that playing with the forces of black magic isn’t fun and games, and it’s not long before they’re head-to-head with all sorts of demonic creatures, shapeshifters, and other forms of evil, all of whom are more than happy to pick them off in the most gruesome of ways.
Peter Dain, Peter Iasillo, Joan Ellen Delaney, Soo Paek, Nick Gionta, Anthony J Valbiro, Lisa Friede, Kim Merrill, Charlotte Alexandra, Al Magliochetti, Felix Ward, Alec Nemser, and Maria Pechukas star.
Are you a fan of Spookies, and are you glad to hear that Spookies 2 is finally in the works? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
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