I was bored last night, so I watched a Christmas movie from 1997: The Christmas List. I’ll spare you watching it yourself, and summarize - a woman who had a bad job, a crappy boyfriend, and an indifferent mother wrote a wish list for Santa, and soon she got everything on her list…but in unexpected ways.
It was okay, I guess, but I think the movie would have worked even better as a horror movie. Instead of the wishes coming true in merely whimisical ways, they could come true in completely terrible ways. Like she might have wished she had kids as sweet as her friends’ and they could be killed and leave her guardian. Or she wished for someone to really love her, and this comes true when she’s stalked by an obsessive killer. Things like that.
So what about you? What movie do you think would be improved by a change of genre?
I’ve got two that I genuinely believe would be great:
Treasure of the Sierra Madre - IN SPACE!
I think this would be totally awesome. Make them astroid minors in the future and have sinsister local toughs from the next astroid over try to take their ‘Triluminum’ away.
Peter Pan - Horror
A creepy ageless boy and his evil sprite kidnap some children and take them to a land with no rules. They must escape before its too late.
Ghostbusters as hardcore horror. We’re talking eviscerations and Dan Akroyd getting some prison-style love from Slimer. Bill Murray being psychologically tortured until he’s reduced to a weeping shell of his former self. Rick Moranis being forced to cut his own hands off to escape a trap, Saw-style.
The Sound of Music as porn. An incestuous father and his crack whore wife take their children into the mountains and set up a survivalist porn farm. Starring Sid Haig and Sheri Moon Zombie.
Transformers and Revenge of the Fallen as serious, Iron Man style movies. You know, with characters, humour that makes the characters involved look better, not worse (i.e. wit, not Bay’s infantile idea of comedy), and more awe-inspiring tech and fighting.
You left out the part where they start an act called … The Aristocrats!
Oddly enough, Ernest Lehman(who wrote the screenplay for The Sound of Music) in one of his monthly columns for *American Film *magazine, wrote a satirical piece called “Agent Dearest” which features an early draft of Sound of Music that’s pretty much identical to the version you described until Lehman’s abusive agent literally whips him and the script into shape. I thought the article was pretty funny but it’s been nearly 30 years since I read it.
That would work (especially if you got Elmore Leonard to update his story). I actually thought the new version of his “3:10 to Yuma” would’ve worked better as a modernized story rather than making a straight western remake.
