by: S. Scott Stanikmas – Senior Staff Writer

With The Hateful Eight currently heating up theaters (and I highly recommend the 70MM version if you have the chance to see it), director Quentin Tarantino is making the rounds in the press again. And he recently revealed a hidden interest that piques my interest.

In an interview with Time Out, the filmmaker stated that he’d like to possibly take a stab (pun intended) at making a really scary horror movie:

…if I had all the time in the world, I would love to make a really, really scary horror film, like The Exorcist. But I don’t know if me taking my sense of humor and putting it in the backseat just to hit a tone of dread from beginning to end is the best use of my talents or my time.

I don’t know if I could let go of that humor and be able to make something like The Exorcist and keep that tone of dread all the way through. Although a case could be made that The Hateful Eight is the closest I’ve ever come to a horror film. And more than any other Western, the film that influenced this movie the most is John Carpenter’s The Thing, way beyond just working with the same composer, Ennio Morricone, and star, Kurt Russell. The Thing also hugely influenced Reservoir Dogs, of course.

I can see his point – he definitely would have a problem tamping down his unique sense of humor. And I don’t think he wants to make a horror-comedy in the vein of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2 or Army of Darkness.

But Tarantino’s respect for genre cinema would make him a perfect choice to bring the chills and thrills back to horror movies.

Either way you slice it, it doesn’t look like this is in his immediate future. But we can always hope.