Hello, everyone! It’s One Of Us’ weekly article series, “The Weekly Wrap-Up.” Covering everything from film announcements to comic books, “The Weekly Wrap-Up” ensures that the biggest stories of the week are analyzed and discussed by our team of writers. This week we talk about M. Night Shyamalan’s new television adaptation of Tales From the Crypt, and the first trailer for James Wan’s horror film, The Conjuring 2.
Tales From The Crypt Returning… Sort Of?
Yes boils and ghouls, the EC Comics based horror anthology show will be returning to television in the near future. However, it won’t be too much like the show you grew up being frightened by in the 90s. News broke recently that director M. Night Shyamalan would be spearheading a new adaptation of Tales from the Crypt for the network TNT, one that would kick off a new horror block for the network. However, due to lingering rights issues from the iconic HBO version of the show, the John Kassir voiced puppet version of the classic Crypt Keeper character will not be on the show. Instead, a cloaked old man with a cane will serve as the host, more in line with the original Vault Keeper character of the comics. Even more distressing, this new incarnation of the show will be more of a seasonal story arc style anthology in the vein of American Horror Story rather than a full on individual episode anthology of the old series.
So, there’s a lot seemingly wrong with this perceived new version of the show. Turning it into a season long anthology feels in particular counter productive to the fun of Tales was getting a completely different story every single week, most of which were adaptations of the original comics. I’m all for a new version of this concept, but this doesn’t seem at all like the correct course for doing it. The older format of having various directors come in and form their own episode could do wonders, particularly with horror directors like Neil Marshall and Ben Wheatley out there. Instead, we’ll get what sounds like a complete misunderstanding of the property… from the director of The Last Airbender. What a shock.
The Conjuring 2 Trailer
Directed by James Wan (Furious 7), The Conjuring 2 finds Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga) investigating another dangerous poltergeist several years after the events of the first film. Instead of exorcising a demonic spirit from a rural home in Rhode Island, the Warrens have traveled across the Atlantic to a Northern Suburb in London, England, where a divorced mother, Margaret Hodgson (Lauren Esposito), and four children live alone. Supposedly based on true events, the Warrens’ investigation, later dubbed the “Enfield Poltergeist,” explored the strange phenomena that occurred around the Hodgson children in 1977.
Though I can’t say I’m the biggest fan of haunted house/ghost films, I was impressed by the original Conjuring. Wan has a talent of creating an effectively unsettling atmosphere, and though he sometimes relies too heavily on jump scares, I admire his ability to create tension in even the quietest of scenes. We see this ability in practice as Farmiga’s Lorraine talks to one of the Hodgson children in the trailer. The conversation perfectly sets the tone for the film and acts as an effective starting point for the inevitable scares. Oh, and the little girl plastered to the ceiling is pretty creep too.
The Conjuring 2 will make its way to theatres June 10, 2016.
