Wes Craven may have passed away in 2015, but his influence and legacy can still be felt in the horror genre. The fifth entry in the Scream franchise arrives next year, while talk over another potential Nightmare on Elm Street reboot has been bubbling away for a while now, to the extent that it feels as though it’s just a matter of time before something concrete gets announced.
The filmmaker’s first two features were also remade well over a decade ago, but Alexandre Aja’s The Hills Have Eyes fared much better than Dennis Illiadis’ The Last House on the Left. Aja was already a rising talent in horror before he updated the story, which raked in $70 million at the box office on a $15 million budget and spawned a sequel that was written by Craven and his son Jonathan, one which did much worse from both a critical and commercial perspective.
We may have already seen two versions of The Hills Have Eyes, both of which wound up receiving subpar follow-ups, but we’ve heard from our sources this week – the same ones who told us Jared Leto’s Joker was getting a new look in Zack Snyder’s Justice League long before it was confirmed – that yet another new spin on the story is in the works.
Unfortunately, we don’t have any further details to share just yet, but horror has always been ripe for reinvention, and history has shown that no recognizable property is ever safe from being remade and rebooted in perpetuity. Besides, this isn’t the first time that we’ve heard that The Hills Have Eyes was getting a second remake, and it would appear that the latest cannibalistic trip to the darkest depths of the Nevada desert has finally started to gather some momentum behind the scenes as we’re told that it’s now in “active development.”