With his deeply hard-hitting action movies, director S. Craig Zahler has thrilled and disturbed his audience in equal measure. Bone Tomahawk combines western tropes with grisly, gory horror. Brawl in Cell Block 99 is a deceptively simplistic prison noir with brutal fight scenes. Dragged Across Concrete is a no-nonsense police thriller with unsympathetic antiheroes and uncompromising bloodshed.
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Zahler is always pushing the boundaries of on-screen violence. In Bone Tomahawk, a man is skinned alive by a cannibal. In Brawl in Cell Block 99, a prisoner’s face is scraped off their skull on the grimy floor of a jail cell. In Dragged Across Concrete, a bank teller is blown apart by a shotgun in a heist gone awry. If Marvel Studios is willing to go into hard-R territory with its Blade reboot, Zahler is the perfect director to get the most bang for its R-rated buck.
Much like Blade, the eponymous antihero in Ana Lily Amirpour’s horror masterpiece A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a vampire who uses her vampiric superpowers to fight crime. Being undead gives “The Girl” a kind of agency that is rarely afforded to women in the horror genre. With its moody visuals, its desolate setting, and its lone-wolf antihero exacting vigilante justice, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night was advertised as “the first Iranian vampire western.”
Blade will be a similar plate-spinning act of multiple genres. It’s a superhero movie, a horror movie, an action movie, and it still needs to find time for an emotional throughline and be anchored by a palpable atmosphere. Amirpour’s breakout movie managed to hold together a vampire vigilante story, a touching love story, and a dystopian sci-fi story with a resolute directorial vision. She’d be perfect for the Blade reboot.
Gareth Evans burst onto the scene with the stunning self-contained action of The Raid, then managed to top himself with the mega-scale gangland warfare storyline of the bigger, bolder, and even better sequel. Evans has made his last couple of films for Netflix, but it’s about time his uniquely jaw-dropping action sequences returned to theaters.
With The Raid films, Evans pioneered a new action subgenre with violence that’s so intense, relentless, and unapologetically bloody that it wouldn’t be out of place in a horror movie. This is exactly the kind of cinematic sensibility that Blade’s vampire-slaying adventures need to shine.
After Jordan Peele’s sketch show made him one of the most acclaimed comedians in the world, his directorial debut Get Out made him one of the most acclaimed horror filmmakers in the world. Peele’s signature style is to combine a genre trope like evil doppelgängers or a Stepford Wives-esque suburban cult with a very real fear like racial prejudice or the use of exploitation for entertainment.
In his most recent movie, sci-fi thriller Nope, Peele deftly handled big-budget spectacle without losing sight of the suspense-building cinematic tricks that made his lower-budget early films so engaging. After the new master of horror expanded his reach with a Spielbergian UFO epic and stuck the landing, the logical next step is a Marvel vampire movie.
In a recent interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to promote Halloween Ends, John Carpenter hinted that he’s ready to end his filmmaking hiatus and get back in the director’s chair. This is great news for horror fans, because Carpenter is a true legend of the genre. He hasn’t directed a movie since The Ward way back in 2010, but his decades-long filmography contains some of the greatest horror movies ever made (and a couple of the greatest action movies ever made).
He defined the slasher subgenre with Halloween, caused many sleepless nights with The Thing, and combined anti-capitalist satire with alien ass-kicking in They Live. The visceral thrills of Escape from New York and Assault on Precinct 13 would combine with the supernatural terror of The Fog to create the perfect Blade movie.
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