Stuart Gordon, director of the funny/scary/gross-out classic Re-Animator, will helm a big-screen adaptation of Benjamin Brand‘s real-life-inspired cannibal play, Taste. [Variety]
Taste is based on the so-called Rotenburg Cannibal — or, Armin Meiwes — who met a young man in a cannibal-fantasy Internet chatroom, killed him, and proceeded, as cannibals do, to consume his corpse. (Evidently this is a thing.)
Gordon and Adam Goldworm will produce and self-finance the project on a microbudget. Brand will be adapting his own play, a joint venture between the director’s Red Hen shingle and the the producers Aperture Entertainment. The former is currently searching about for actors, and will reportedly include some of the play’s cast.
In 2001, Meiwes feasted on a willing participant for his kill-someone-and-eat them fetish after a string of no-gos; at least several of the previous candidates had a fantasy so bizarre that even Meiwes was turned off. I have not seen this play, but I fervently hope they include that scene in the film.
Stuart Gordon‘s Re-Animator, it should be said, is a cult-classic, spawning a trilogy and a musical. His other credits include the equally awesome From Beyond, Dolls, The Pit and the Pendulum, and 2007’s Stuck.
Hardcore gore freaks will want to see this one, but when it comes to true-life fictionalized horror, the success rate is spotty at best. Case in point: The Avengers and The Bourne Legacy star Jeremy Renner portrayed the infamously sick Jeffrey Dahmer in a biopic that no one saw. (Dahmer is streaming on Netflix… but it’s not that great.)
Still, this material is most definitely in the man’s wheelhouse. Says he:
“It’s rare that real horror is done onstage. ‘Re-Animator‘ the musical is more comedic than scary. But ‘Taste‘ may cause people to actually pass out or lose their lunch in the theater.”
Well, all right. If there’s one man who can make it work, it might be Gordon.
What do you think of this idea? Would you see a cannibal horror-comedy, or is that a stupid question?