Dario Argento has been behind some lacklustre projects in recent years, but he seems properly enthused by his new movie The Sandman. He's recruited rocker Iggy Pop to star in the film and help shill for a crowdfunding campaign that, we're promised, will allow the giallo genius to make the film his way, without compromise.
This is very much not to be confused with Neil Gaiman's Sandman, which is making its own way to the screen via Joseph Gordon-Levitt, David S. Goyer and Gaiman himself.
Argento's has an earlier literary basis in the work of 19th century German author E.T.A. Hoffman. Hoffman's Sandman is a bedtime boogeyman who steals the eyes of naughty children who won't go to sleep. The story involves Nathaniel, whose boyhood obsession with the Sandman leads to an encounter with crazed alchemist Coppelius. In adult life Nathaniel remains haunted by the whole business to the point of madness and to the despair of his fiancé Clara. There's an also some odd business about Nathaniel falling in love with a clockwork automaton.
Argento's version has become a Christmas horror starting with a child witnessing his mother's murder (Nathaniel's father dies in the original).
"I'm tired of these Christmas movies showing goodness," says the director. "I'd rather have a Christmas movie where there is violence and horror. And this is what I'm going to do!" There's no mention of clockwork girlfriends so far. But the poster perhaps suggests something...
"What the world needs so much right now is a good, artistic, gothic, terrifying scare up the boom-boom," chortles Pop. "If I could play the Sandman for Mr Argento it would make my life complete. I hope I have not just written my own epitaph. Let's all die horribly together in a blaze of glory!"
The IndieGogo campaign launched yesterday and runs for a month, with a hoped-for target of $250,000.