According to The LA Times Eisner is set to direct the latest remake. And it sounds, thank goodness, as if the film will be sticking to the original creep-fest's script, about a mother who telepathically communicates with her mutant babies, causing them to kill.

Here's the original synopsis:

A man tries to uncover an unconventional psychologist's therapy techniques on his institutionalized wife, while a series of brutal attacks committed by a brood of mutant children coincides with the husband's investigation

The film is slated for early 2010, which means we won't be short of any remakes this year. What with The Crazies, The Creature from The Black Lagoon, Wolf Man and others

Dead Ringers isn't the most famous, or the most graphic, of David Cronenberg's films, but it shows you don't need buckets of gore to be absolutely terrifying and push people's buttons. Just one look at those weird torture implements is enough to send anyone screaming in the opposite direction. I also love the part where he lunges on top of the patient and starts huffing the anesthetic. Good times. [IMDB]

Risky Business is reporting that Cronenberg is being backed by Fox to direct, and potentially write, a remake of his classic body-horror flick The Fly.

There is no one who does trippy "your body is deceiving you" horror quite like Cronenberg, and we're so glad to have him back. But fair warning Hollywood, replacing Jeff Goldblum will take some doing.

Kusama shared an interesting little newsy bit about her body horror screenplay she's presently trying to get made with Rachel Weisz.

io9: What's next for after Jennifer's Body - will you stay in the supernatural, horror or genre realm?

KK: There's a screenplay I wrote a while a go with a partner that has a sort of element of horror, although I would call it a psychological horror in the David Cronenberg tradition, that I'm tying to get made.

io9: How are you influenced by David Cronenberg?

He's a very important film maker to me. I've watched a lot of his movies with a lot of admiration. I feel like he's somebody who early in his career found ways to marry concepts of horror and certainly elements of gore, but those elements had some sort of deeper meaning, beyond the surface of the movie.

And you're applying that to your screenplay inspired by him? Can you talk about that at all?

It definitely does fall into sort of a body horror movie that deals very, very specifically with our concept of gender. I can't really talk to you specifically about it other than to say that Rachel Weisz is attached to the film.

Rachel Weisz and gender issues - I'm excited!

Me too actually. Let's hope that some day it finally gets some money.

So we don't know too much about this project just yet, but you have to admire someone attempting to bring back the Cronen-gore, although I shudder to think of anything happening gender-wise to the lovely Rachel Weisz. But I'd love to see more body-bending effects akin to Videodrome and The Fly.

This movie has a special place in my heart, and not just for the sarcastic monster dialogue. First of all, it's Clive "Hellraiser" Barker, so the monsters are cool, sympathetic, and kind of sexy. I love when the monster sees our human girl and grumbles, "There goes the neighborhood!" Plus the bad guy is a serial killer psychiatrist played with campy calm by David Cronenberg — yes, the same Cronenberg who directed Scanners, The Fly, and A History of Violence.

And frankly I'm just a sucker for the basic underlying plot of Nightbreed, which is that the monsters are a misunderstood minority who hide away from the cruel humans and form a grotesquely sweet, caring community under an old cemetery. Plus, I love that all the demons in this movie smoke. Where do they get cigarettes in their underground city? [Nightbreed via IMDB]

According to Reuters, Cronerberg has said that the opera version of The Fly isn't a straight remake of the movie — so opera-goers can expect some surprises. Reuters continues:

Movies have rarely made the transition to the world of opera, but Cronenberg said the basic plot of "The Fly" had the elements of love story, retribution and transformation common to many operas that made it ideal for a stage treatment.

If this opera version of The Fly goes well, I'm hoping for an adaptation of 2001 for the opera hall. Call it a space opera opera.

The Fly opens this month at the Los Angeles Opera.

The Fly Gets Opera Treatment [Reuters]

The new show - developed by Cronenberg and The Lord of The Rings soundtrack composer Howard Shore makes its debut in France next week, before coming to the US for a LA run this September. The official synopsis of the show runs as follows:

The Fly is an engrossing exploration of the physical and psychological transformation in which a brilliant scientist begins to mutate into a hybrid of man and fly after one of his experiments goes horribly wrong. Researcher Seth Brundle makes a stunning breakthrough in the field of matter transportation when he successfully teleports a living creature. Frustrated in his budding romance with a scientific journalist, and in need of a human subject, he recklessly attempts to teleport himself. An unseen fly enters the transmission booth as well, however, and Brundle soon realizes that his experiment has had "mixed" results.

"Mixed" in this case meaning "Expect brutal arm-wrestling incidents that turn into graceful dance routines, all put to a toe-tapping beat," of course. How long before this show follows The Producers and Hairspray in the movie-musical-moviemusical route, and can we tempt Jeff Goldblum back when it does?

Seth Brundle Sings His Greatest Hits [Chud]

While Frank tries to calm Nola down, Raglan is upstairs trying to rescue the couple's daughter from a herd of rage babies. The best part is the way they're all dressed in cute little pastel onesies in this giant room full of bunk beds. It's like sleepaway camp with mind-controlled mutants! Watch them kill! This is one of those classic flicks that probably wouldn't get made these days. Partly that's because 1979 was a golden year for freaky psychotherapy, but also because today this would all be CGI. And CGI just don't bleed like that freaky-ass baby does. [The Brood via IMDB]

Besides Cronenberg, Vigalondo expressed interest in Kurt Russell or Bruce Willis for the remake's leading man (and what scifi fan could blame him?). Vigalondo also has hopes for Adam Brody as the scientist and Joan Allen for the main character's wife. Timecrimes is about a man who travels back in time and discovers that infinite possibilities lead to infinite corruption. And that's before he comes face-to-face with himself. [Blog de Cine via Shock til You Drop]

For my money, two of the scariest science horror flicks out there are David Cronenberg's 1980s version of The Fly, and Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later. What stands out about them, aside from the fact that they are eat-your-arm scary, is that they are both sustained, visually-arresting movies about men going apeshit because they are men.

The Fly is a simple tale of a guy who has invented a teleportation pod that has a bug in it — literally. One day when our mad scientist Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) is zooming between pods a fly gets stuck in there with him and the computer decides the best way to deal with the situation is to merge the two creatures genetically and create BrundleFly.

The film's special effects sometimes look strange and jerky to our CGI-trained senses, but Cronenberg manages to use a puppet-and-prosthetics infrastructure to his advantage by sticking to visuals that look as real as possible. When our mad scientist Jeff Brundle merges genetically with a fly and starts to transform, we are truly grossed out by his mulchy face and sudden need to eat sugary food by barfing on it first and then slurping it up fly-style.

Brundle is a stereotypical male science geek, totally obsessed with his machines and teleportation experiments to the point of caring about little else (though he does take some time out to get with Geena Davis — who wouldn't?) He's your basic guy nerd who doesn't give a crap about his body or meatspace. It's all about the machines. Brundle's rapid physical deterioration into half-fly, half-man is as pathetic as it is terrifying: He makes us gag and we feel sorry for him, so when he goes lethal, we sort of understand why. His gooey revenge is exactly what the Star Wars Kid has in mind for us.

28 Days Later draws its frenetic horror from another stereotypical idea about what dudes are like when given the chance. A virus turns most of the population of England into bloodthirsty, mindless superzombies, and one of the only holdouts against the diseased hordes is a military squadron holed up in a fortified mansion in the country. Our heroes, who have also managed to survive and escape London, join the military dudes for safety.

But then they discover the truly scary shit. These military guys, led by Christopher Eccleston at his most eye-buggingly Naziesque, have been trying to lure women into their little lair so that they can imprison them, rape them, and "restart the human race." Unfortunately, two of our heroes are female and now they're trapped between zombieland and a dark, dudely place.

This is a gory movie, but its horror doesn't come from looking at decaying bodies like it does in The Fly. Instead, it's scary because we're watching a decaying society. In Boyle's vision of the apocalypse, a bunch of guys with guns are more horrifying than any genetic disaster. He seems to suggest that men automatically revert to a state of violence and rape when provoked, and the inevitability of that transformation is what terrifies — the fact that these men seem so blind to the fact that they've become monsters.

And yet one of the heroes of 28 Days, Jim, is a guy who refuses to join Eccleston and his rape gang. He has no interest in possessing his female companions, and his blood-soaked rescue of the women takes up the latter half of the film. I think seeing the evil military guys through the eyes of another man who doesn't want to be like them makes this movie even more of a nail-biter. It would be easy for Jim to join up, to stay safe in the house protected by their guns, and to have a little gang rape for fun on the side. But he fights tooth and nail (literally) to stop that from happening.

In fighting the monstrous men, of course, Jim has to become a little bit like them. Those fight scenes are some of the most chair-grippingly intense I have ever seen. Scary, gory, shocking.

That's true horror, people. And never a vadge in sight.

The Brood is one of Cronenberg's more personal films. He's said that he wrote it while coming off a bad divorce, and you can tell: the film is about a woman seeing a demented psychologist in an effort to save her failing marriage. To channel her anger, the psychologist (played with wack abandon by Oliver Reed) urges her to "give birth to her rage" literally. She grows dozens of these strange, deformed toddlers with no digestive tracts that sort of come out of welts on her stomach and try to kill people she's angry at. Like her husband, for example. Luckily, the rage babies die quickly due to the lack of mouths and asses, but not before some people die and hubby freaks out.

We'd bet that Cronenberg would love to see a remake of The Brood from Lynn Hershman Leeson, director of biopunk indie Teknolust, the tale of a mad biologist and her sperm-eating cyber-creations. What The Brood lacked was a female perspective, largely because the female lead was mostly just an angry monster-creator. But who better to revisit this story than the imaginative Leeson, who clearly has a way with smart actresses (Tilda Swinton is amazing in the four roles she plays in Teknolust). She could remake the movie from the perspective of the woman having the rage babies, who is trying desperately to stop giving birth to them. Instead of the horror being in the mind of the husband stalked by the babies, it's in the mind of the mother who can't stop birthing monsters. Sort of like Rosemary's Baby crossed with Aliens or something.

Steal this pitch, Leeson! And get Cronenberg into the theater.

Cronenberg remakes [MTV Movies Blog]