Saw and Insidious director James Wan has been hatching a plan to produce a slate of horror films with Icon Entertainment for some time now. It looks like one of the first off the production line will be House Of Horror, with Xavier Gens taking up position behind the cameras.
House Of Horror seems as if it will be told in flashback, with a captured suspect in a police cell relating the events that got his five amateur ghost-hunting friends massacred in the titular ruin. The story unfolds via straight cinematography, "found footage", videos from the interrogation room and TV news reports, and it apparently comes to seem increasingly likely that our narrator has brought something with him out of the house, which he says is a gateway to Hell.
We've often wondered why the heroes and heroines of horror moviews don't more often end up in hot water with the authorities after all their friends / family are horribly murdered and the supernatural forces responsible vanish. So, a decent premise then, if one that's a bit like Blair Witch 2...
Gens directed the barking mad French cannibal nazi horror Frontiere(s), and had Hitman taken away from him in the editing suite because Fox deemed his cut too astonishingly violent. His latest, the post-apocalyptic thriller The Divide, has played at a couple of festivals in the UK so far, but hasn't yet scored a general release date here. It's out in the States in January.
The **House Of Horror screenplay is by Max La Bella, from initial musings by Wan, and Gens is coming in as a replacement for Javier Gutierrez, who has departed for reasons unknown. Gutierrez is possibly joining the remake of The Crow, but we don't know that for sure yet.