When director Patrick Lussier agreed to remake the 1981 slasher film My Bloody Valentine, it wasn’t necessarily because he wanted to help develop a groundbreaking technology.
“It was a chance to revisit a great genre and revisit a classic Canadian tax-shelter film,” explained the filmmaker during a recent interview in L.A. “(But) very quickly we discovered this was the perfect movie for 3-D.”
A throwback to the slasher genre, My Bloody Valentine 3-D (in theatres today) reveals cinema’s latest killer — a mysterious psychopath named Harry Warden. Although it was assumed he died 10 years previous, the pickaxe-wielding maniac suddenly shows up terrorizing residents of a small town in full 3-D. While the compelling technology certainly adds a cool element to the horror, Lussier insists Valentine isn’t a gimmick film.
“First and foremost, if you want a movie that’s scary you have to care about the people who are being scared otherwise you won’t be scared with them.”
Screenwriter Todd Farmer would agree. While testing out a new technology on the fly was a great challenge, an even bigger battle was ensuring the script wouldn’t reveal the killer’s true identity until the end.
“At the end of the day we were very aware of the movie we were making,” said Farmer. “At the same time, the horror audience is a lot smarter than people give them credit for so we constantly wanted them to be able to turn on a dime as to who the killer was. For this type of movie, that’s part of the fun.”
