While there are no new updates regarding the rumored Beetlejuice sequel that is a collaboration between the film’s original director Tim Burton with his new bro-ish protégé, Seth Grahame-Smith, it’s safe to assume that it’s still a go, considering a decade-late sequel would be rather apropos for Burton these days. Smith, on the other hand, has mastered the tactic of combining historical tales with the absurd, so it’ll be fun to see how Beetlejuice fits with the Spanish Inquisition.

In the meantime, super fans of the original film like myself and that guy who runs the world’s largest Beetlejuice museum from his home could use a little pick-me-up, and fortunately YouTube users Rivergrl21 and Nuropsych1 have just what we need. Using their XBOX 360 in “creative mode” (I have no clue what that means), the duo spent the last two months developing a Beetlejuice roller coaster in Minecraft.

Warning: After watching this amazing video, you might become instantly depressed that this coaster doesn’t actually exist.

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Fox’s original Fantastic Four movies went along way towards creating the perception that led to that old adage “Fox is f*cking terrible and can’t do anything right.” But today’s Fox is a new Fox, with a track record of putting out actually decent superhero movies like Chronicle and X-Men: First Class. It’s (hopefully) that new Fox who’s rebooting Fantastic Four. They hired Josh Trank from Chronicle to direct and brought Matthew Vaughn of X-Men First Class on to produce, and so far so good. And now they’ve brought on Seth Grahame-Smith, of Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter fame, to rewrite the script. So… Eh? Should we expect Fantastic Four and Wendigo (pictured)? Fantastic Four vs. The Duppy?

Author and screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith has done polish screenwriting work on Fox’s reboot of Fantastic Four, which Josh Trank is directing.
Sources say that the new reboot is taking a grounded superhero and sci-fi approach to the heroes and will tap deep into the comics mythology, which featured not just the better-known villains such as Doctor Doom and Galactus but also alien races the Kree and the Skrull, and the anti-matter universe known as the Negative Zone.
Grahame-Smith is the best-selling author behind Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, the latter of which was adapted by Fox last year. The multi-medium maven penned the script for the movie as well as the script for Dark Shadows, Tim Burton’s take on the 1970s vampire soap opera. [THR]

I still don’t quite know what to think about Seth Grahame-Smith. His books seem like an incredibly tedious exercise in stretching out a throw-away joke, to the point that the tediousness of it becomes the joke. I can’t imagine needing to read more than 15 pages of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. But if I’d had the idea for that throw-away joke, and someone wanted to pay me a bunch of money to stretch it to tedious lengths, I’d probably stretch stretch stretch until I was buying gold hoagies and diamond-encrusted foam cowboy hats too. Then there’s Dark Shadows, which was a train wreck only in the most generous sense of the phrase. Do we blame that on Grahame-Smith, on Tim Burton, or on the idea of making that a movie in the first place? I don’t know. All I know is that Seth Grahame-Smith’s formula of “take public domain work with name recognition, add element of kitschy fantasy” is every studio exec’s perfect boner dream. At this point, I’m not sure he can be stopped.

photo credit: lev radin / Shutterstock.com

Seth Grahame-Smith (aka Seth Jared Greenberg – why would you give yourself a hyphenated name on purpose?) has written Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies so far, and if you think he’s abandoning his gimmick just because everyone else is also cashing in on it now too (see also: Snow White & The Huntsman, Little Red Riding Hood with werewolves, Edgar Allen Poe: Murder Detective, Swordfighting Shakespeare, etc., etc., etc.), you’d be wrong. As his recent interview in The Hollywood Reporter begins:

Mash-up king Seth Grahame-Smith’s new novel Unholy Night re-imagines the story of the Three Wise Men of the Nativity as a swords-and-sandals adventure romp.
It turns Balthazar, one of the Wise Men, into a swashbuckling thief, who ends up helping Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus escape the clutches of Pontius Pilate, while encountering supernatural things along the way.

YOU STOP THAT, HAND! DON’T YOU START DISMISSIVELY WANKING ON ME NOW, WE’VE STILL GOT WORK TO DO!

But it turns out, adding werewolves and zombies and vampires and Predator and the duppie (DA DUPPIE!) to old stories isn’t all he’s been up to (sidenote: come on man, the bible already has lepers, a talking bush, and the Jewish aquaman who can manifest booze and fish sandwiches, does it really need MORE supernatural?). Turns out he’s also a scriptwriter. Having already worked with Tim Burton on Dark Shadows, he’s also got a stop-motion animated project called Night of the Living and a Beetlejuice sequel, both for Burton.

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Hot on the heels of the domestic trailer that came out yesterday, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter now has an international trailer. Whereas the American version was mostly slow-motion and fire, this one provides more plot and voiceover and Dominic Cooper (though it still has plenty of slow-motion and fire, don’t you worry about that). Cooper plays Henry Sturgess (to Ben Walker’s Lincoln), who’s apparently a vampire who gives Lincoln’s secret vampire diary to the book’s narrator.

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Seth Grahame-Smith’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter was a gloriously silly idea combining the history of Abraham Lincoln with a bloody fight against vampires, a kitschy-cute premise, even if he’d already sort of beaten the joke to death in his first book. Or as the book description put it:

While Abraham Lincoln is widely lauded for saving a Union and freeing millions of slaves, his valiant fight against the forces of the undead has remained in the shadows for hundreds of years. That is, until Seth Grahame-Smith stumbled upon The Secret Journal of Abraham Lincoln, and became the first living person to lay eyes on it in more than 140 years. Using the journal as his guide and writing in the grand biographical style of Doris Kearns Goodwin and David McCullough, Seth has reconstructed the true life story of our greatest president for the first time-all while revealing the hidden history behind the Civil War and uncovering the role vampires played in the birth, growth, and near-death of our nation…

So what do you get when you let the Kazakhstani director of Wanted make a movie adaptation of what was basically a 300-page mash-up of prose styles? Judging by the trailer, you get Blade with top hats, basically.

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