Kevin Smith, the man behind cult comedies Clerks, Mallrats and Chasing Amy, is making a new movie. However, it isn’t one of the many potential projects fans of his have been anticipating — it’s a mostly new horror idea called Killroy Was Here.
Kevin Smith is making a new horror movie. Image: Facebook
We say “mostly new” because it’s an adaptation of one of Smith’s previous ideas. Smith explained yesterday on Facebook Live.
“We were gonna make this Krampus movie and then somebody went and made a Krampus movie,” Smith said. “Ours was an anthology that played more like Creepshow or, to appeal to the modern day kids… let’s say, Black Mirror. So yeah, it’s kinda like that. It’s an anthology. So our Krampus movie which was called Comes the Krampus and then later on Anti-Claus, it got shelved. So we decided to re-engineer that dopey script. We turned it into a different movie. We just changed the Krampus character — it’s almost the same script. Took the Christmas elements out of it. Instead, we’re calling it Killroy Was Here.”
Smith is shooting the film in Sarasota, Florida with the help of students from the Ringling College of Art and Design. He didn’t give a timeline on when he expected it to be out, but The Playlist did find a few more quotes that explain the idea of the film.
“This is a monster movie in the sense of a classic morality tale,” Smith said. “No one wants to see you spill the blood of innocents, but when someone crosses the line and goes bad, you get to make them pay in horrible ways, and the audience cheers.”
“We wanted to make an anthology film in the vein of Creepshow. Killroy is like the Golem, the Boogeyman and the Grim Reaper combined,” he added. The title, and potentially even the character, are reportedly based on the famous “Kilroy was here” cartoon that became popular during World War II.
Smith making this film has to be a surprise to his fans. Most expected him to move from his last two films, Tusk and Yoga Hosers, to Moose Jaws, the third film in his self-proclaimed True North Trilogy. He was also supposed to make Mallrats 2, which reportedly he couldn’t get funding for, or Clerks 3, which got stalled when one of the leads dropped out. So now it’s Killroy Was Here. After some fans were disappointed by his last few films, I for one am holding out hope for some of that 1990s Smith magic to reappear here.
Here’s Smith’s Facebook Live announcement and a glimpse of rehearsal from the set.