Two of the busiest men in Hollywood have decided to team up for a new horror flick. Ryan Murphy currently has three show on TV – American Horror Story, The New Normal and Glee – and he’s also preparing to shoot AIDS drama The Normal Heart. Jason Blum is the prolific producer behind the likes of Paranormal Activity, Sinister and Lawless (he produced eight movies in 2012 alone).
Yet somehow they’re planning to find time to remake the obscure 1976 horror film The Town That Dreaded Sundown. Movieweb says that Murphy revealed the info during a Q&A session, where he told them Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, who directed the American Horror Story: Asylum finale, is in negotiations to direct.
Murphy said, “There’s no deal done, we’re just working on it. I’m friends with Jason Blum, who is one of the producers on The Normal Heart movie that I’m doing, and he is also the brilliant mastermind behind the Paranormal Activity series. Jason has a very great idea to do horror movies for a price, and I think that’s right. He said to me, ‘If there’s ever anything that you want to do, please come to me.’
“The movie that I was most freaked out by as a child was this movie that no one ever saw called The Town That Dreaded Sundown, which is based on the Texarkana things. I was just starting to babysit my brother, and the ads for that would come on and I would get freaked out. I went with him with this, and MGM was gracious enough to do it with him, so we’re doing a modern-day version, remake, weird, meta thing with that. He (Alfonso Gomez-Rejon) is in negotiations to direct that, so hopefully we’ll shoot that in the spring, before we go back and do American Horror Story.”
The original film, loosely based on a true story, follows a Texas Ranger (Ben Johnson) trying to hunt down a serial killer in Texarkana, Arkansas. It’s not clear if Murphy will write the remake, or if that job will go to somebody else.