When anybody throws out the name Kevin Smith it’s generally greeted with a smile, as it’s synonymous with adolescent (yet hilarious) comedies; such as Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, and Dogma (all of which he has written and directed), not to mention the most famous comedy duo he has created, Jay and Silent Bob (Smith himself actually plays Silent Bob), who appear in practically all of his films, and even received their own feature, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back in 2001; but later this year, Smith will begin filming Red State, a film that is being presented as a darkly serious, and utterly bleak, horror movie.
Red State is another film written by Kevin Smith himself, and though there have been few plot details leaked thus far (possibly because he has said that the film “re-invents itself about every twenty minutes”) it promises to be something special, as it’s partially modelled on the 1975 thriller Race With the Devil (which is apparently one of Kev’s favourite movies); a film about a camping trip that goes horribly wrong, after the campers accidentally stumble upon a satanic cult and witness a human sacrifice, before being chased down by the murderous cultists.
However, Smith’s Red State doesn’t focus on devil worship, and instead deals with fundamentalist Christianity (he’s previously dropped the name of Fred Phelps as an influence; the man whose independent Baptist church preaches that God not only hates homosexuals, but the society that permits their existence, and the same man that was the basis of the Louis Theroux documentary, The Most Hated Family in America), and he says that this film will deal with “intense religious worship” because “there’s nothing more horrifying than that”, going on to add that “you can keep your fucking thirty-foot shark.”
But despite the themes and ideas, Mr. Smith has constantly argued that Red State will not be a traditional horror film in any way, and is “very much in the spirit of people in the wrong place at the wrong time.” But whatever the film re-invents itself to be by the time filming starts (which is scheduled to be this coming July), it shall remain a thoroughly intriguing picture, and it should be interesting to see just how well Kevin handles a genre that is so different from what he is used to.
