Pride And Prejudice

10 Classic Films That Would Be Better With Zombies

By Christopher Campbell posted 9 months ago

Publisher Quirk Books and author Seth Grahame-Smith have come up with the best way to make a literary work more accessible since the creation of Classics Illustrated comic books: they’ve added “all-new scenes of bone crunching zombie action” to Jane Austen’s 19th century novel Pride and Prejudice. This new version, out in stores this May, is titled Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance – Now With Ultraviolent Mayhem! And if you didn’t think it was a masterpiece before, chances are you will now.

Could we do the same thing to classic films? Well, the technology to add extraneous enhancements to movies exists. Just check out The Curious Case of Benjamin Button for proof. But like Pride and Prejudice, we’d need to “enhance” films in the public domain if we wanted to get away with it. Fortunately, there are hundreds of such titles (see a list at Wikipedia), some of which actually already have zombies (Night of the Living Dead, White Zombie, Revolt of the Zombies, and in a way the “scientific” film Experiments in the Revival of Organisms).

Avoiding the majority of public domain movies already consisting of horror and science fiction elements, we’ve come up with ten great classic films that would be even greater with the addition of zombies.
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Classics, Featured, Lists

10 Literary Classics to Turn Into Summer Blockbusters

By Christopher Campbell posted 1 year ago

Yesterday I wrote of the news that Wanted director Timur Bekmambetov is helming an effects-heavy adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. It’s not entirely shocking, but it does still seem like a cruel joke. More specifically, it sounds like something Jasper Fforde would jest about in his Thursday Next novels. Of course, the news came just as I’m in the middle of Fforde’s latest, First Among Sequels, in which Pride and Prejudice is turned into a reality TV show.

Although I’m not exactly well read as far as literary classics go, I’ve been wondering what other revered books (particularly those in the public domain) could be reworked as potential summer blockbusters. Obviously, there are certain sci-fi, fantasy and adventure novels that work, yet the fitting fictions of Verne, Wells, Burroughs, Dumas and others are already fodder for cheap movies with lots of action and/or special effects. Therefore, I’ve tried to limit my choices to those books that aren’t such easy candidates for a Memorial Day weekend opening.

1. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

Dante’s epic poem has inspired a few films over the years, including the hugely successful 1911 silent L’Inferno, but it’s about time for Hollywood to bastardize the otherworldly tale with lots of computer-generated visuals. Maybe you’re thinking that What Dreams Come already made some attempt at this, and it failed at the box office. Sure, but it was still an awesome spectacle of a film. Now, think of something similar starring Will Smith as Dante. And some rewrites to allow for more fight scenes (yes, even in Heaven). The poem will be divided into a trilogy of films, of course.

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