After catching his big break in Hollywood directing stoner comedies Pineapple Express and Your Highness, David Gordon Green has spent the last decade branching out as a filmmaker, moving into drama with the likes of Joe and Stronger before pivoting into horror with his reinvention of the Halloween franchise alongside Danny McBride, with the duo’s venture into uncharted territory resulting in the most successful outing for Michael Myers yet.
Green and McBride are currently hard at work on sequel Halloween Kills, before moving straight onto their trilogy-closer Halloween Ends, but it looks like they’ll be staying in the horror genre for a while yet, with the news that Green has signed on to direct the pilot episode of HBO’s Hellraiser series, as well as serving as an executive producer with McBride as part of their Rough House Pictures Banner.
Clive Barker adapted his own novella to bring the horror icon to the big screen in 1987, with a film that would go on to spawn a franchise that suffered greatly from the law of diminishing returns across nine sequels that arrived over the next three decades. The upcoming TV adaptation doesn’t appear to have any impact on the proposed big screen reboot that Dave Bruckner was recently hired to direct, and will instead act as an expansion of the mythology that acknowledges the events of the movies.
Based on what they did for Halloween, HBO will surely be hoping that the duo can successfully update the Hellraiser brand for modern audiences, especially with a competing movie effort also in the works at the same time. Battlestar Galactica’s Mark Verheiden and Godzilla: King of the Monsters director Michael Dougherty are set to handle the scripts as well, which is a lot of genre experience coming together to create a brand new take on both the franchise and the iconic Pinhead.
