Having made a triumphant return to the horror genre with the awesome Drag Me To Hell, it seems that Sam Raimi just can’t stay away.
For he’s signed on to produce Refuge, a scary fillum that will not only mark the directorial debut of British wunderkind, Corin Hardy, but also fill the gaping hole in cinema marked, ‘Yeti Movie’.
Yes, that’s right – Refuge is about a small town in the Himalayas that comes under attack from its local Abominable Snowman. And if that doesn’t instantly make you want to drop everything and start queuing right now, then we don’t know you half as well as we think we do.
So, Raimi will produce, but it’s Hardy who’s the one to watch here. A director of music videos, including The Feeling’s Without You, Keane’s Bedshaped and The Horrors’ She Is The New Thing, Hardy is a horror disciple, with a handy background in practical FX, so it’s possible that he’s the real deal when it comes to frightening folks, and not just cynically going down the horror route like so many other music video directors who dip their toes into the feature-length world.
Intriguingly, Hardy will also direct a short film based on Refuge’s premise, before he makes the film proper, in an attempt to refine his vision. Raimi won’t produce that one – instead, Jason Blum, who also shares production duties on the Big Film, will oversee that one.
Fellow Brit, Tom De Ville – a man whose name indicates that he was born to write horror films – will write both Big Refuge and Little Refuge.