While speaking with director Joe Dante about his long-awaited fantasy-chiller THE HOLE (see article here), Fango asked him what was up with a couple of projects he’s attached to: the anthology PARIS, I’LL KILL YOU and MONSTER LOVE, also set in the City of Lights.

A horrific takeoff on the popular romantic omnibus feature PARIS, I LOVE YOU (PARIS, JE T’AIME), I’LL KILL YOU has been in the works for a while now, and Dante tells Fango, “it’s supposed to shoot in January. There are eight other directors, and it’s been worked on for the last several years, but it’s finally coming together. Sam Hamm, who wrote [the MASTERS OF HORROR entry] HOMECOMING for me, scripted my story, and it’s a culinary horror film. RATATOUILLE with monsters, I guess you could call it. MONSTER LOVE, which takes place in Paris and is all about werewolves and vampires [see previous item here], is currently being rewritten, and we’re hoping to make that next year as well.

According to Dante, it’s no accident that his latest projects are set and will shoot on foreign soil: “Everybody is finding it easier to find financing overseas—assuming that’s it’s easy to find financing at all, which it isn’t. There are funds available in Europe to make films that are not commensurate to what you’d find here. You certainly can’t expect the studios to fund a movie, because half the time they don’t want to make it unless you bring them most of the money, the cast, the script, the storyboards, everything. And the jobs they used to do, now you do. You do it for free until they decide they want to distribute the movie. They don’t make as many films as they did, and when they do, they’re either very, very, very low-budget or extremely high-budget tentpoles. And so there are fewer jobs and fewer movies. That’s a lot of the reason why I think shooting has left Hollywood, because really nobody makes pictures there anymore. I mean, they make deals and they may write scripts, but the movies are almost never made there now.”

One project that never got made, which Dante was supposed to direct, was BAT OUT OF HELL, about passengers and hijackers on a red-eye flight from LA to New York confronting monsters. “I was attached to that, and it did not fly, as we say in the trade. We thought it was a good idea, and we talked to Andy [Caplowe of VooDoo Pictures] about it, but we never got much further than that. I think it was going to cost a bit too much money.”

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