The Creature from the Black Lagoon Remake On the Way

Refreshingly, the latest news in the world of remakes isn't coming from the '80s. Instead, we get word of some needed wind in the sails of the long-discussed update of the 1954 classic, The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The project has floated around for more than 10 years now and passed through the hands of such greats at Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro. STYD brings us news that not only is the project on a solid path towards release next year, but good headway has already been made on the production.

"The Creature has been designed, we've spent six months designing him," director Breck Eisner told STYD. An Amazonian location has also already been chosen. too. "There's this place called the Forest of Mirrors, because there are so many lagoons on a thousand mile green carpet river, and we found the lagoon we're going to shoot in." Joining Eisner is Gary Ross as the screenwriter, who is son to one of the original authors, Arthur Ross.

This is all seemingly great news for the project, but I wonder what the end result will be. Aside from the whole inescapable dodginess associated with remakes, you have to admit that it's not an easy challenge to scare audiences nowadays, especially with a landscape that has been traversed many times since the '50s. Everything from Anaconda to Primeval has tried its hand at the doomed-jungle-creature-expedition with very mixed results. This is only to say that we're a bit familiar with the material from the start, so it feels like Ross and Eisner have some work ahead of them to avoid getting caught in the same mundaneness created by those others