Following the release of his remakes of Halloween and Halloween II, rocker, director and all-around horror freak Rob Zombie was set to remake 1958 sci-fi classic The Blob. Following a series of meetings with the owners of the film's rights, Zombie decided it was against his best interests to take on the project and walked away for good. He told Deadline.com back in 2010 of the abandoned project, "I wanted to break away from anything related to preexisting material. The remake train is getting pretty tired now and when I made Halloween, everybody complained, either that it was too much like the original or too different."
The director was, at the time, gearing up for 2012's Lords of Salem. He continued, "I like that people either love or hate what I do because it's better than being in the middle, which means forgettable. But when you do an original premise, they take it on face value and after three years of not being able to win on Halloween, I just couldn't go through that again."
Working with Zombie on the defunct project was frequent collaborator artist Alex Horley, who has worked on everything from tour merch and music-video storyboards to the director's prospective boxing film T. Rex. Horley recently unveiled some of the 2009 pre-production sketches for The Blob on his website, showing different imagined scenes such as "The Monolith," complete with a field of fallen "blob people" surrounding a mysterious oblong rock formation, and a "Monolith in the Park Festival" scene where bands congregate around The Monolith in seeming reverence and appreciation.
Zombie had no interest in simply recreating the original movie with updated effects, telling Variety (via MTV) years ago, "My intention is not to have a big red blobby thing, that's the first thing I want to change ... I'd been looking to break out of the horror genre, and this is really a science-fiction movie about a thing from outer space." He wouldn't have strayed far from his spooky tendencies, though, adding, "I intend to make it scary, and the great thing is, I have the freedom once again to take it in any crazy direction I want to. Even more than Halloween, where I had to deal with accepted iconic characters like Michael Myers and Laurie Strode. The Blob is more concept than specific storyline with characters, so I can go nuts with it."
See Horley's art below to imagine what might have been.
