'Saw' Director James Wan Takes Over 'Castlevania'

After a series of stops and starts and the hiring and removal of director Sylvain White, the Castlevania video game adaptation is finally starting to gain some traction again. The movie is being produced by Paul W.S. Anderson of Resident Evil fame, but the film's immediate chances looked bleak until this week. Bloody Disgusting says that original Saw director James Wan is taking over the project from White, and the new director vows a new direction. "I'll be working on the script with a writer to give it a new spin, different to the previous versions. This will have my stamp on it, which Konami is very excited about." Although he didn't discuss details like a production start date or casting, Wan nevertheless comes in with a good knowledge of the game, which can't hurt:

"The thing I love about what Konami did with Castlevania, was taking the iconic Dracula mythology and Eastern-European setting, and retelling it with a Japanese pop-cultural sensibility. That's the East-meets-West tone I want to visually expand on for the film. I'm thrilled by the opportunity to make a highly stylized, fantasy, action film that focuses on the gothic storyline and the cool, anime-like characters. For once, the human hero is as sexy and dangerous as the vampire villain, and his weapon of choice was what attracted me to the project in the first place - The Vampire Killer Whip."

We talk about video game movies quite a bit and how there just hasn't been any consistency in that arena yet. Most of them aren't very good, they look cheap, or they stray too far from the game for its fans. Obviously, Sam Raimi's freshly announced World of Warcraft won't be cheap and if Halo ever happens that will be big, too. But Castlevania has tons of fans all over the world and they're going to have certain expectations. Wan is a good low budget horror director, but I'm not sure that qualifies him very well for a project like this. However, I don't expect it to be phenomenal anyway, so maybe he's as good a choice as any.

Comments

[Will]

Yeah, not sure I could stand two hours of some dude jumping in the air breaking candles with his whip just to see what pops out of them. Seems like it would get repetitive after a while...

"Oh look, a longer whip!"
"Oh look, a beating heart!"
"Oh look, a crossbow!"
"Oh look, another audience member walking out of the theater!"

[lisa]

My boyfriend has been a castlevania fan since he was a kid, and I just showed him this and he said, "oh no." in a bad way.

[mdamien13]

IMO James Wan is much better than Paul WS Anderson (who was on board as a producer and writer for this at one point). I have low expectations but I'm glad that the man who killed the AVP franchise before it could even start and who has run the Resident Evil franchise into the ground is off of this one at least.