The world of Universal Monsters has gone through a number of evolutions over the past decade, with Paul Feig, director of the upcoming Dark Army, offering new insight into the project and detailing how he aims to embrace horror elements from the roots of monster movies, yet will still bring with it plenty of fun and humor. The filmmaker has kept actual plot details under wraps, but based on his tease about the overall tone of the film, it sounds like it will be quite different from recent universal monster movies like Dracula Untold, The Mummy, or this year’s The Invisible Man.
Videos by ComicBook.com
“Tonally I’m being very true to the traditional monster movie genre,” Feig shared with Collider. “Not ‘horror movie,’ ‘monster movie.’ I love those movies of the ’30s, the James Whale movies, [and] Bride of Frankenstein, I still think is one of the greatest films of all time. So I want that tone because those movies were very fun. They treated them seriously, but you also know they were also having a lot of fun with them, so there are a lot of extreme characters in them and funny side characters. That’s what I want, I never wanted to make a horror movie. I want to make a true monster movie.”
Feig is primarily known for his comedies, but in 2016 he delivered audiences a reboot of Ghostbusters. The film had the unenviable task of reviving a beloved franchise that honored a number of staples of the series while also attempting to reinvent it for a new generation, with some of its biggest successes being the ways in which he balanced the film’s humor with its horror.
“To me, it’s about outsiders,” the filmmaker added. “Those monster movies, a lot of them were directed by gay directors, and I’ve read a lot about how these monsters represented outsiders in society and how they felt and all that. So that kind of realism and the emotions of it are very important to me. It’s not just scaring people, it’s how do you invest in these situations and these characters? You know, [Frankenstein’s Monster] is such a tragic character. That’s the kind of feel I want with this. It’ll be funny, but it’s not a spoof. It’s fun and funny in the interactions of these characters, but the situations are very real and serious. I hope we get to make it.”
What will surely make fans even more excited for the project is that Feig revealed it was one of his favorite scripts that he’s ever written, and pointed out that, unlike the recent reboot of The Invisible Man, which found success by embracing a small scale, his film will be a much larger experience.
Stay tuned for details on Dark Army.
Do these details have you excited for the new film? Let us know in the comments below or contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter to talk all things horror and Star Wars!
