More than three years ago, a wild little short film called Panic Attack hit the interwebs. “Giant Robots invade Montevideo!” the slugline reads, and the exotic location made perfect sense: it wasn’t exotic at all for the creator/writer/director of the chilling pseudo-documentary of alien attack: after all, Fede Alvarez was native of Uruguay and a resident of Montevideo when he used the modest resources of his commercial-production firm to make the movie.
In the processes that no one can predict and every one wishes for, Panic Attack went viral. Today the YouTube upload of the entire short has been seen by almost 7 million people, and you can still see it here. Alvarez was whisked to Hollywood, feted by agents and studios all over town…and then, quietly, disappeared.
There’s no telling how many meetings he took, how many pitches he made, how many promises got broken, but now—finally–we’ll be getting a chance to see what Fede Alvarez can do. He’s just wrapped principle photography as director of the long-awaited remake of the horror classic Evil Dead.
Alvarez was hand-picked by Sam Raimi, Robert Tapert, and Bruce Campbell. The careers of all three of them–as director, producer, and actor–were launched by this audacious, hilarious, cheesy and scary little horror film, and they have held tight control of the property ever since. Fans may not be happy that this is a completely new story–no Ash, no chainsaw arm, and no Bruce Campbell–but now that the original star himself as seen a roughcut, he’s 100% behind the project. In an interview with Digital Spy, he said, “We’re really excited and really behind it, [but] it’s going to take a bit to get the Evil Dead fans behind it. We know we’ve pissed a lot of them off. We appreciate that and we appreciate their anger and their zeal, but the only thing we want to impress upon them is that we didn’t screw it up. This is going to be just as memorable as [the original] Evil Dead without being the same movie. It’s a contemporary movie–just like Evil Dead was contemporary in 1979, this is contemporary for young adults now…It’s basically five new kids who are going to have a really bad night with a brand new director. I’ve seen it already; I think it’s definitely fabulous.”
Post-production is underway, but we’ll still have to wait awhile to see if all the promise of Panic Attack in ’09 and all the hoopla since is worth it. Evil Dead is scheduled for release in 2013.
