And I realised, ‘Oh my God, this is going to be awful because if the studio wants a star then the studio is going to get a star and they’re not going to get a star and not show his face.’ Whether or not the Skulduggery movie will ever happen is another story! But even then, I was hedging my bets because I got to the fourth book and I was in the middle of talking to the studio…Īt that time, yes. On the subject of CG Gremlins, am I right that you don’t want a CG Skulduggery Pleasant in a movie adaptation, you want him to be played live-action with a green-screen head? The Hitcher remake was awful, The Fog remake was awful, most remakes are dreadful and if they go CGI for the Gremlins, that will lose ninety per cent of its charm.

When it’s something like that when you can actually bring something of quality to a remake which didn’t have those same chances, that has a chance to be artistically credible. The production values are better, the sound is better, the visuals are better, the acting is better.

I probably prefer it to the original simply because the original makes me actually queasy, so I can’t actually watch it. I’m actually a fan of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake with Jessica Biel. I don’t mind it if the resurrected film is at least on a par. What do you make of Hollywood resurrecting those films from our childhoods? It’s apparently going to be a sequel not a remake, taking the Jurassic World approach, like thirty years on. Back then they weren’t afraid to push the envelope and so Gremlins is just… I’ve never seen it on the big screen, it’s always on TV and it really does encapsulate a very specific time of my life and a lot of other people’s lives.Ĭhris Columbus is producing. You’d get away with cursing, with partial nudity, with all of these things that you would not have a chance with in a PG movie today. It was a choice between Gremlins and Ghostbusters.īack in the eighties, when I was just discovering pop culture and horror culture, movies for kids were a lot more adult than they are these days. So when Harper Collins came to me with the idea that maybe we could show a movie or two, it became basically a journey to find which two movies, one for a general audience and the other for adults, could I show to pretty much encapsulate the ideas behind the series. The entire Demon Road trilogy is a love letter to American horror, books, TV, comics, movies.

Let’s talk a bit about Gremlins and A Nightmare On Elm Street, the two films you’ve chosen to share with your fans.

Skulduggery Pleasant by Derek Landy