Simon Pegg and Jeffrey Combs Join The Gathering
Steve Barton
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We’ve been talking about the horror star-studded flick The Gathering for a while now, and news has just come that the cast has expanded by two. A very big two.
According to Fangoria, both Simon Pegg and Jeffrey Combs have signed on for some spookery! The mag caught up with producer Jon Keeyes, who spilled the beans!
“We’ve got Simon Pegg attached to it now. He’s going to play the devil, and because of that, we’ve suddenly got a whole lot of interest in The Gathering again, and it’s starting to really push forward,” said Keyes. “We’ve [also] got Jeffrey Combs playing Edgar Allan Poe (pictured below). David Naughton is playing H.P. Lovecraft, Doug Bradley is playing Bram Stoker, and for Mary Shelley we’ve got a couple of major female names who have said they’d like to do it, but we’re going to wait and see what happens once the financing lands. And then we’ve got Udo Kier, Clint Howard, Robert Englund, Lin Shaye, Ashley Laurence, Gunnar Hansen, Bill Moseley, Debbie Rochon, and William Sadler committed to do the movie—it’s a huge cast.”
So, what is The Gathering about, you ask?
“On Halloween night the devil brings together Mary Shelley, H.P. Lovecraft, Bram Stoker, and Edgar Allan Poe in purgatory to tell their best untold tales, the idea being that whoever has the best story of the night gets to leave purgatory forever. That’s the framing device around all the anthology stories within the film.”
As for which stories the famed authors tell, Keyes explained…
“We’ve tried to put a spin on the essence of the stories they’re most well known for. So Bram Stoker tells a vampire tale, but it’s not about Dracula. H.P. Lovecraft’s story is sort of Re-Animator-esque, set in the Victorian era. We’ve approached it with the idea of what these writers would be like all these years since they died. They’ve got a slightly modern sensibility, as if they’ve kept up with the changing times while they’ve been in purgatory, while still holding on to the personalities and nuances they would have had in the eras they lived in. So there’s a whole lot of bickering and rivalry.”
“One of the things I love about The Gathering is that we cover all the horror subgenres—vampires, werewolves, zombies, ghosts, slashers—within our stories, but in the framing segments with the devil and the writers, there’s a real comedic-horror element going on. They’re taking jabs at each other, and they each have a bit of magic they get to play with since they’re undead, so a lot of fun stuff happens with that.”
The Gathering is looking to begin production this coming May. Vincent J. Guastini will be handling the FX work.
Stay tuned.
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