The Horror of Pride and Prejudice

I said I want an alien!

Jane Austen's novel "Pride and Prejudice" is about to be turned into two different satirical horror movies. Who thought that classic literature can be so scary.

According to The Geek Files, "Elton John's Rocket Pictures has bought a script called Pride and Predator by Will Clark, Andrew Kemble and John Pape, in which an alien creature massacres the characters. Clark is also set to direct.

Sir Elton will executive produce the film, including supervising the music, and his Rocket partners Steve Hamilton Shaw and David Furnish are producing."

"It felt like a fresh and funny way to blow apart the done-to-death Jane Austen genre by literally dropping this alien into the middle of a costume drama, where he stalks and slashes to horrific effect," Furnish told Variety.


Are you an alien?

Principal photography on the film will begin next year in London.
One may wonder how a classic novel can be woven into such a strange tale with aliens. Copyright expired on the book years ago and now it can be adapted into anything.
Seriously, check out the next movie idea. It is even wilder than than the Elton John one.

According to the Times Online, "Hollywood studios are bidding to turn a radical reworking of Austen’s most popular book, now called 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,' a parody to be published in April, into a blockbuster movie.

This weekend Seth Grahame-Smith, the author of 'P&P&Z' who is based in Los Angeles, revealed how he and an editor at Quirk Books, an independent publisher, developed a diagram tracing connections between seminal period novels to cult movie genres, including robots, vampires and aliens.

'It quickly became obvious that Jane [Austen] had laid down the blueprint for a zombie novel,' said Grahame-Smith, a television comedy writer. 'Why else in the original should a regiment arrive on Lizzie Bennet’s doorstep when they should have been off fighting Napoleon? It was to protect the family from an invasion of brain-eaters, obviously.'

From then on it was easy to imagine Bennet and her four sisters as zombie slayers, trained since childhood in the deadly arts of Chinese kung fu, and Fitzwilliam Darcy as a promoter of the socially superior ninja skills of Japan. Together they stand bonnet to epaulette against a plague of cannibalis-tic interlopers from the accursed city of London.

Grahame-Smith hopes that his talent agency, William Morris, will sign a film deal with a studio in the next few weeks.

'About 85% is the original Jane Austen text,' he said. 'I hated her when I was forced to read Austen in school, but when I started rereading I realised she was a brutal, but very funny, satirist. I can only aspire to be as mean-spirited as she could be.'"


Sisters, zombies are on the loose. Get your knives.

These films can either be good or bad, but no doubt they will be hilarious. Doing a satire on classic literature seems to be the wild craze now because other agencies are working on adapting other books into satirical horror stories.

"Other talent agencies are pitching their own slate of monster-lit titles," said the Times Online. "They include a version of Emily Brontë’s 'Wuthering Heights,' where Catherine, the deceased heroine, returns as a Japanese-style ghost not only to haunt but also to terrorise Heathcliff.

In a reworking of Charlotte Brontë’s 'Jane Eyre,' Mr. Rochester has something more terrible than an insane spouse in his attic, and a version of George Eliot’s 'The Mill on the Floss' is powered by human sacrifice."

Any of you read these books and want to see them turned into a horror film? What will be next, turning classic horror films into comedies? Wait...that's already been done.

More news to come! Catch ya' later!

Run! Zombies!