The ripple effects of Paranormal Activity’s smash success continue to circulate around Hollywood, with studios all aiming to find the next big, and more importantly, cheap hit to work alongside the mega budget blockbusters. Now Bob Weinstein’s Dimension Films genre label thinks it has a contender in The Mummy Archives.
While the last few visits from the bandage-wrapped monster have been the big-scale Universal-produced Brendan Fraser adventures, Dimension is thinking small and subtle, with a plot that finds several young people haunted by a mummy’s curse.
A lot of the chills will happen either off screen or in darkness, with characters – and, Dimension hopes, cinemagoers – feeling the effects without the film needing to show everything.
It’s still in early development, but the company already has a writer/director in mind: Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego, who found success with Spanish thriller El Rey de la Montana (The King Of The Hill), which found two lost travellers hunted through a forest.
According to the LA Times, he’s in final negotiations to write the script and direct The Mummy Archives, which would be made for around $5 million. So not quite Paranormal cheap, but still thrifty…