Remember when Kevin Smith said he was going to retire from filmmaking following Clerks III? Well, it’s been some time since that announcement and Clerks III has yet to materialize, though it seems a the director wants to begin shooting the sequel April 7th. After that, is his time in the director’s chair over? Not quite. Smith has now announced that he hopes to shoot and release Comes the Krampus! after Clerks III. In other words, Smith’s retirement is not still on hold.
Comes the Krampus! will be an anthology horror film along the lines of Creepshow and is based off one of the many shows in the Smodcast Network, Edumacation. Taken from Episode 20 of the aforementioned show “Big Man on Krampus,” in which the legend of Krampus is discussed at length. Smith’s Edumacation co-host Andy McElfresh banged out a script for the anthology in less than a month (the show aired 12/23/13). McElfresh, Smith, Jason Mewes, and more (including Smith’s wife, Jen) will be directing the various segments of the film.
Krampus, is the bizzaro version of Santa Claus essentially. Instead of a jolly fat guy who travels the globe delivering joy under your Christmas tree every year Krampus is often a hideous creature who simply loves to eat children. Comes the Krampus! will be a series of four shots along with one framing story to tie them all together. Smith expands on the idea by saying that the script as is could be a very low budget effort not unlike his latest Smodcast film awaiting release, Tusk.
In other Smodcast news, Smith was originally toying around with another Smodcast topic being adapted to film, Helena Handbag. The director has since decided to switch that project up and will be adapting it as a musical instead with The Book of Mormon as his muse.
Each of these bits and pieces of news kind of have me excited. I’ve been listening to Smodcast for years and I have often found Kevin Smith to be very creative and funny, even if I do get kinda burned out by hearing a lot of the same jokes from show to show. I still really like Red State (though more for Michael Parks than anything else) and I have a morbid curiosity to see how Tusk turns out, but I think Smith still has a lot of things he can accomplish in the film industry so to see his retirement put on hiatus for a little bit isn’t all bad news to me.
What do you think of the idea for Comes The Krampus!? Are you a Kevin Smith fan? What’s your favorite Smith film? Thoughts on all his upcoming projects? Sound off below!