Justin Long Teases the Horror-Comedy Project He and Sam Raimi Wanted to Make After Drag Me to Hell

The shared universe concept of film franchises might feel like a new idea, but in the early days of the horror genre, iconic monsters crossed paths with one another on multiple occasions. While two Universal Monsters met in 1941’s Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, the comedic duo Bud Abbott and Lou Costello regularly had run-ins with horror characters such as the Mummy, the Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and more. In the spirit of those adventures, actor Justin Long and director Sam Raimi discussed developing a project that would see that unique blend of horror and comedy after delivering audiences Drag Me to Hell in 2009.

“I remember talking, I’m so bummed we never did it but we, during the press tour, we would talk a lot about how much we loved Laurel and Hardy and Sam loved Abbott and Costello, but I was more a Laurel and Hardy guy,” Long shared with ComicBook.com. “But we were saying how there aren’t those movies anymore, like Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy and those horror-comedies that were more comedic than horror. They were really comedies first. But we talked about, ‘Oh God, wouldn’t it be fun to do one of those.’ To just do, I don’t know that there’s been one in a while. It’s really hard to find the right story.”

With both comedies and horror films, if an audience isn’t on board from the beginning, the tone of the picture can completely fall flat, making the blend of comedy and horror an even more difficult endeavor. One of the last films to not only bring together a number of familiar horror figures while also incorporating a playful sense of comedy was The Monster Squad in 1987, which pit a group of teens against vampires, werewolves, and other classic creatures.

“Exactly, yeah. You keep it real and all that,” Long noted of the success of Monster Squad. “Our thing is we wanted to, I think it was going to be, solving these mysteries. Kind of like Scooby-Doo mysteries, but told in a very grounded, as grounded as you can with like a monster thing, told in a really fun, grounded way. Sam Raimi’s take on Abbott and Costello Meets Frankenstein, something like that.”

You can keep up with Justin Long by listening to his podcast, available at the Life Is Short with Justin Long official website.

Would you like to have seen this project come together? Let us know in the comments below or hit up @TheWolfman on Twitter to talk all things horror and Star Wars!