In a new interview with Collider about his recently-released cannibal romance Bones and All, director Luca Guadagnino expresses interest in remaking one of the original Universal Monsters movies. Does that mean he’ll actually do it? Probably not! But it is nevertheless a fun thing to think about, and therefore we’re gonna spend a few minutes with it.
Asked which horror classic he might be interested in remaking after bringing a new Suspiria to screens in 2018, Guadagnino says, “I think it would be amazing to do something about The Mummy.”
Pressed as to why he’d be keen to take on that particular title, the director adds:
“It’s a rotten body in rotten bandages, so what’s inside is [as] interesting as what’s outside. It should be very scary and very, very terminal … It should be a little movie but with a lot of depth and very scary.”
A Luca Guadagnino-helmed remake of The Mummy would be a helluva thing, wouldn’t it? For a filmmaker so devoted to time and place, we can imagine the sets and costumes on this one being real eyepoppers, and Guadagnino’s insistence that the film be both “very scary” and “very, very terminal” leads us to believe he wouldn’t pull punches in the fear department, either. If we learned tomorrow that Guadagnino has already wrapped Timothee Chalamet in gauze bandages “just to see what it looks like,” we would not be surprised.
Like it says up top, this is no declaration of intent on Guadagnino’s part: he’s likely just playing along with the softball question he’s been tossed here, and coming up with an intriguing pitch on the spot. That said, if this filmmaker ever gets his hands on that property, we’ll be first in line to see what he comes up with!
