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December 11, 2008


IGN chatted with director Rob Cohen this week for the DVD release of The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, during which time we had the chance to ask him about his upcoming project, the remake of The Monster Squad.

Here's what he had to say:

IGN: Okay, I have to ask this question because the movie is a favorite of mine, but where are you on the proposed Monster Squad remake?

ROB COHEN: I'm trying to get Paramount to do that. After doing all the legal tracing of who owned the rights…it turns out the rights reside with Paramount. And trying to get the guys over there to look at it, you'd think it was a lifetime commitment…I think some of the movies I made in that period like Legend of Billie Jean and Running Man and Monster Squad, they were, in a funny way, ahead of their time. If Monster Squad was made today, just the way that Fred [Dekker] directed it, but with better special effects – which now are a no-brainer – that movie could have been a phenomenon….I mean, no matter what age you, c'mon! The Wolfman's got nards!

IGN: Would you have any fear that those villains don't hold the same horror iconography for today's generation?

COHEN: I think you need to reinterpret them. If you do them the way we did it in the mid-80's, you're gonna have a problem. With the power of advanced make-up design, and with the power of CG, and with an attitudinal change, that movie could be remade and be hip and scary and funny. How many movies do you go to that have that combination? You make Dracula much more sexual, much more contemporary. You turn Frankenstein into something other than from The Munsters. You gotta find ways to take those characters and remystify them and give them the power that we expect from monsters.

IGN: Any director's in mind for that?

COHEN: I'd think of directing it myself. I'd love to make something like that, something that involved kids and myths and the fears of children. About why we don't want to look at our closets at night. I've got kids now and it'd be nice to make a movie that they could see!