What does Breck Eisner mean to Horror, if anything?

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A few weeks back it was reported that The Crazies remake director Breck Eisner would also be at the helm of a remake of Cronenberg's The Brood after the completion of what sounds like a potentially giant misfire in the form of a Flash Gordon revisit. Eisner was also set to reprocess The Creature from the Black Lagoon, but bowed out for the gaggle of mutant children in winter wear.

Like most fresh horror genre news that I actually hear, I was mostly indifferent, but was tinged not by the more obvious aspect of the tidbit. Yes, the industry's continued insistence on remaking every damn thing, from classics to just already solid efforts, is stupefying. The Crazies "re-imagining" judging by the trailer looks to be a marriage of The Happening and Twister...or something. Though what about the prospects of one director behind two nearly-consecutive horror remakes?

Being the beginning-of-Rocky Rocky Balboa of horror blogist commentary, I'm unsure if this distinct occurrence being a precedent or not. I'm fairly certain this sorta thing has happened in the screenwriting world, but can't point to any examples. So working under the basis of a director overseeing two scary remakes being a precedent, the future implications for the genre seem ripe to ponder.

What happens if Eisner is successful with both features? Will emerging directors see horror remakes as an (even more) appealing way of breaking into the top end of the business? Or will there be directors who wallow in nothing but these bloody revisits? Either way, horror fans are still in for a screwin' with more "been there" dreck for possibly years to come, that is if Eisner succeeds at generating enough box office bank for studios to take note and if one personally feels malcontent towards this ongoing redo trend.

A lot can happen between now and The Brood 2011's final tally, but all this might be a more pivotal event for the Hollywood view of the genre than upon first glance. Maybe Eisner's Crazies will flop royally? Maybe The Green Hornet will prove average moviegoers don't give a shit about such obscure, old franchises and derail Flash Gordon hurting Eisner's status? Maybe Saw VII will be the 3-D sea change for the genre? Ugh.

Who knows, but you gotta wonder what the future of mainstream American horror holds? Not a new question by any stretch, though with Avatar digging ditches of Swiss bank cash, perhaps a string of ambitious epically-scaled horror features with actual budgets are the savior? Marc Forster's upcoming adaption of World War Z comes to mind. In this respect, The Battle of Yonkers could become analogous with the point the genre stood up again. If not, hell, it would still nice to see some ambitious epically-scaled horror features instead of Hollywood continuing to cart out the genre for first weekend monetary shots (with remakes only compounding the brutality) to finance bigger and better projects outside of horror.

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