Wes Craven Eyeing Shocker and People Under the Stairs Remakes

Hey, remember “Shocker”? Or “The People Under the Stairs”? No? Well, er, they were horror movies from the late ’80s-early ’90s by Wes Craven. “Shocker” was about a death row inmate who got electrocuted but instead of dying gained powers (hate it when that happens), while “People Under the Stairs” was about a crazy couple that kept people hidden in their walls. Or, er, under the stairs. I think. Point is, Wes Craven is now thinking about remaking both of them.

Wes Craven told the boys at Arrow in the Head this during a shindig celebrating the upcoming “The Last House on the Left”, another remake of a Craven movie:

“We’re actually talking about remaking THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS. Possibly SHOCKER also. So these ones that we’ve been remaking, especially THE HILLS HAVE EYES and THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, I own with the producer. Two different producers and both close friends. Peter Locke with The Hills Have Eyes and Sean Cunningham with Last House. So we now own them after thirty years we got them back. It’s funny because when we made those deals we thought, we’ll never be alive in thirty years, we were all like [mimicking smoking pot]… but it turns out we’re still alive. So were able to remake those. And People Under the Stairs and Shocker, although we don’t own them, Universal owns them but we have rights with Universal and myself, and the producer who is Shep Gordon to say yes or no. So if we all say yes we can do it. Universal can’t go off and make them with somebody else. So we’re talking about doing that now.”

I don’t know what’s stranger, that Wes Craven admits he used to be a pothead, or that he’s loving the idea of remaking all of his old movies because he didn’t think he would live long enough to actually be able to remake them. Normally I would rail against Hollywood remakes, as us movie site running peons are wont to do, but what the hell, it’s the man’s movies, he can do whatever the heck he wants with them.

Anyways, about the remakes. Here’s the trailers for “Shocker” and “People Under the Stairs”. I actually saw the latter movie in the theaters when it originally came out, back when I was but a wee lad, and even then it didn’t seem all that scary to me. Kind of stupid, actually. “Shocker” was fun, though. It starred the bald dude from “The X-Files”.