Kevin Smith surprised many of his fans when he announced that his next project as a writer-director would be a horror film. Known for his comic book and sci-fi interests, this genre seems to come out of nowhere. Smith told Rotten Tomatoes that it’s always been in the back of his mind.
"It’s just it never came up," Smith said. "Nobody ever asked. It’s not one of those things that people ask you point blank if you’re a fan of the genre very often, but those are the movies I grew up watching. When we first got cable in our area, that’s what we all wanted to watch. We all wanted to watch "Friday the 13th." We all wanted to watch "The Hearse." We all wanted to watch those movies because they would play on cable late at night on Friday and Saturday. So I’ve always been a fan of the genre but it’s just I never really had anything to add to the genre. Recently, I felt like I’ve got an idea that I’ve not seen anywhere. I think I might like to try it and it would also be a nice test to see if I could even pull it off."
What may surprise fans the most is that Smith intends to play it straight, not like the snarky, self-referential horror films of the late 90s. "I think even in every horror movie, even in something like "The Shining," I don’t know if I’d consider it a flat out horror movie, but there are horrific elements to it. It’s so unsettling in some places that it’s funny. His performance is f*ckin’ so bravado and so twisted and you’re in the safe confines of the theater knowing it’s a fictional story that it’s okay to laugh when this dude is f*ckin’ trying to kill his own wife. So there are moments like that that come from discomfort and levity and moments of levity that come from discomfort or fear of danger but I think that’s as far as I would go in the one that I want to make."
All the classic ’80s horror movies had lots of gratuitous nudity though. Surely an aficionado would have to deliver that. "I don’t know, man. I still can’t get my head around the notion of t**s for the sake of t**s, so I don’t know if I would go that way. But it is kind of a key element to the genre so I don’t know. That’s a hurdle I think I’m going to face sooner or later."
