'Death House' Wants To Be 'The Expendables' Of Horror Movies

Before his death in 2015, horror icon Gunnar Hansen—who played Leatherface in the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre —wrote a script uniting major horror icons in a team-up movie, like The Expendables for the horror movie genre. The idea has since been picked up by director Harrison Smith ( Camp Dread ), who adapted Hansen’s original script into a new movie called Death House. The cast he’s assembled should give any horror movie fan the creeping Tinglers.

Death House unites Robert Englund (Freddie Krueger), Kane Hodder (Jason), Doug Bradley (Pinhead), Bill Moseley (Chop-Top), Michael Berryman (Pluto), Dee Wallace (The Hills Have Eyes, The Howling, Cujo), Danny Trejo (Danny Trejo), Barbara Crampton (Re-Animator , From Beyond), Ken Foree (Dawn of the Dead, From Beyond), Don Shanks (Michael Myers) and Camille Keaton (I Spit On Your Grave).

That’s all you need to know about Death House. Seriously, it’s probably best not to know more. Okay, if you insist.

The official synopsis for Death House promises something a bit… messy (and not in the blood and guts way):

“The Death House is the Area 51 of Evil … a subterranean government facility that holds humanity’s worst on nine levels. Hell, Dante’s ninth level, holds the Five Evils … the “dark stars” of Death House. These individuals are so heinous they can never walk among society again. They may also be supernatural. Agents Toria Boon and Jae Novak have their own dark pasts, arriving at Death House to tour its levels and observe its denizens first-hand as well as the medical and mental experiments of Drs. Eileen Fletcher and Karen Redmane. Their depraved experiments date back to the Nazi doctors of WWII. Prison cells are virtual reality holo decks that recreate prisoner environments before they were incarcerated…”

It goes along its rambling way from there. Suffice to say, all the inmates of Death House escape, and our special agents have to enlist the Five Evils to restrain the villainous hordes.

It’s unclear whether the many horror icons in the cast will be playing similar characters to those that made them famous, but it’s probably a good bet.

If this all seems like a great deal of plot and action for a horror movie, you might be catching on to the central weakness of the premise of a horror version of The Expendables. The bigger and more overstuffed a horror movie gets, the more it looks like an action movie with horror set dressing.

Still, director Harrison Smith promises that he’s not making a “gimmick film.” Speaking with Bloody Disgusting, Smith said, “We are making a solid horror piece… dark, nasty and gore soaked. It will not be satire or tongue in cheek.”

We’ll find out if it’s possible when Death House arrives in 2017.