Horror History: Skull Island: Blood of the Kong – What Is It? We Hear from Neil Marshall
Steve Barton
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With Kong: Skull Island in theaters, some people have been noticing another project on IMDb entitled Skull Island: Blood of the Kong, listed as being from director Neil Marshall. We decided to do a bit of digging to find out!
“This was a spec script written by myself and Simon Uttley that we pitched around town about a year before Legendary announced their project,” Marshall tells us. “In all honesty, I can’t remember if ours was ever pitched to Legendary or not, but it certainly went to Universal, who made Jackson’s King Kong, who passed.”
In typical IMDb fashion, they have the wrong synopsis of the script. Neil and Simon’s was FAR cooler!
“Our script was actually a prequel to the Kong legend, set in the 1800’s, with a group of pirates winding up on Skull Island and encountering a highly developed but dying civilization there. The ruins of this civilization are in evidence in Jackson’s version of the story. They have been using the unique local plant life as a kind of DNA-enhancing drug to breed huge gorillas to act as guardians to protect them from the ferocious dinosaurs that also inhabit the island. But the guardians – known as the Kong – have since turned on their creators in revolt. Our pirates wander right into the middle of a war raging between the two factions. Ultimately both sides are wiped out in a huge volcanic eruption, leaving only one infant ape alive – this would of course grow up to be the King Kong we know and love. But basically, pirates and dinosaurs! What more more do you want?”
In a perfect world, I tell ya! Chalk this one up to cool stuff we’ll never see!
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