Eli Roth In Talks To Remake The Funhouse

Eli Roth is one of those writer/directors from the Quentin Tarantino school of talking about projects and ideas in development, many of which might never come to fruition (not a bad thing, it keeps us working). Recently Roth has been talking up his Transformers-sized sci-fi epic Endangered Species and Thanksgiving (based on the faux Grindhouse trailer) which he plans to shoot back to back. But now Roth tells Fangoria that he is also in talks to produce (possibly direct?) a remake of the classic 1981 Tobe Hooper horror film The Funhouse.

I'm talking with Universal about that one. The Funhouse is a movie where the first half is brilliant—they set up these great characters—and then they pay off none of them. You have Marco the Magician sawing his daughter in half, the brothers who run the carnival and the funhouse setting. And then it's all about this weird mutant thing. It should be about the kids getting killed in horrible ways, put in different contraptions in the funhouse and the final girl being strapped into the ride and sent into the tunnels to be confronted by terrifying tableaux of her dead friends. A smart remake could be so much fun. Kill the kids in fabulous ways and continually reuse the bodies by making them freaks in the freak museum, sew their eyes shut, waxworks... That's the stuff I want to do in a remake of The Funhouse.

If anything else, it sounds like a remake could present a bunch of fun carnival deaths.  I'm embarrassed to admit that I've never seen The Funhouse, but I've enjoyed some of Tobe Hooper's other work (who doesn't like The Texas Chan Saw Massacre or Poltergeist?). The original film told the story of two young couples who go on a double date to a mysterious carnival, where they witness a brutal murder. You can watch the trailer for the original film embedded below.