'Death House,' the Slasher Horror Version of 'The Expendables,' Is Happening
'Death House' is the answer to horror's prayers.
Ever since The Expendables managed to prove that you can just give an audience everything they love simultaneously, other genres have been scrambling to put together their own versions. The Expendabelles has been in development since 2012 at Adi Shankar’s production company to do a full kick-ass female protagonist team for action and sci-fi lovers, but no one has ever put their stamp on a workable horror team.
When the Suicide Squad trailers started taking off, I figured this might be the time that Hollywood would back a film where all the protagonists were very much not that thing. Announced today, we have confirmation that this horror project is finally moving forward in the form of Death House.
The official synopsis reads thusly:
“The Death House is the Area 51 of Evil … a subterranean government facility that holds humanity’s worst on nine levels. Hell, Dante’s ninth level, holds the Five Evils … the “dark stars” of Death House. These individuals are so heinous they can never walk among society again. They may also be supernatural. Agents Toria Boon and Jae Novak have their own dark pasts, arriving at Death House to tour its levels and observe its denizens first-hand as well as the medical and mental experiments of Drs. Eileen Fletcher and Karen Redmane. Their depraved experiments date back to the Nazi doctors of WWII. Prison cells are virtual reality holo decks that recreate prisoner environments before they were incarcerated. A special hallucinogenic gas keeps inmates under control. The victims are homeless, bused into Death House to play literal victims while killing habits are studied. The results are sick, but only a hint of what goes on here. Hell literally breaks loose inside the facility when an EMP device detonates, killing all power and communication and … releasing every prisoner. Boon, Novak, and Fletcher are caught in a race against advancing prisoner hordes led by occultist Neo-Nazi Sieg. The monsters are freed, and they’re going down. Boon and Novak’s fight through Death House turns into a house of horrors gauntlet; their only hope of escape is descending into Hell and enlisting the help of the Five Evils. Events culminate in a violent face-to-face standoff with absolute evil … only to find that they have traveled down a rabbit hole and through a looking glass. Black is white and white is black and the definitions of good and evil no longer apply. Who are the monsters? Who will escape?”
iHorror reports that the film will be directed by B. Harrison Smith, and tentatively set for release some time in 2017. Death House began its life as a script penned by the late Gunnar “Leatherface” Hansen, who envisioned a concept that would allow for all the beloved horror icons to unite. His passing delayed production, but his vision lives on.
Who is on board? The IMDb page lists the following confirmed cast members: Robert Englund, Danny Trejo, Michael Berryman, Kane Hodder, Dee Wallace, Bill Moseley, Barbara Crampton, Doug Bradley, Ken Foree, Camille Keaton, and Don Shanks.
