This Day in Horror: Happy Birthday Breck Eisner

Mandatory Credit: Photo by Erik Pendzich/REX/Shutterstock (5239462cl) Breck Eisner 'The Last Witch Hunter' film premiere, New York, America - 13 Oct 2015

Born on this day in 1970: Breck Eisner

Eisner’s thesis film, a “tech-noir thriller” called Recon, led to him directing high-profile commercials, which led to him directing episodic television and made-for-TV movies. His feature directorial debut was Sahara, starring Matthew McConaughey.

His biggest genre credit is a remake of The Crazies, George Romero’s 1973 film about a virus that turns people into, well, crazies. They become hyper-violent and quickly turn to murder. In addition to The Crazies, Eisner directed an episode of NBC’s horror anthology Fear Itself, and The Last Witch Hunter, starring Vin Diesel as an immortal witch hunter who must stop a plague from destroying New York.

Eisner was set to direct The Creature From the Black Lagoon remake in the 2000s, but it never happened. I spoke to Eisner about it in 2008, and at that point, he had already scouted the location and picked a lagoon in the Amazon to shoot the exteriors on. They had not decided on whether the Creature would be practical or CG, but he assumed it would probably be a mixture of both. Unfortunately, the project fell through in 2009, for reasons that were never publicized.

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