Who will be the next Jess Franco?
Takashi Miike
We attempt to focus on up-and-comers here in Director Roundup, but it is difficult to pass up some heavy hitters with some independent works, especially when their latest works seem potentially phenomenal. Takashi Miike might be the modern Jess Franco if only for quantity that retains auteurism. We don’t have the research to back that up, but if we are wrong we are not that wrong.
The first article your writer wrote for Psycho Drive-In was a review of Miike’s Yakuza Apocalypse (2015). Written by Yoshitaka Yamaguchi, the movie is a what-if story about a vampire in the Yakuza. Hayato Ichihara, Riki Narumi, and Shô Aoyago star. Yayan Ruhian appears. He’s the modern day Al Leong–when you see him, something is going down. He starred in The Raid: Redemption (2011), The Raid 2 (2014), The Force Awakens (2015), John Wick 3 (2019), and much more.
My first experience with Miike’s work was watching Audition (1999–what a year for film), one of those movies where one scene, the telephone scene, nearly defines it, like “my sister, my daughter” or the scene with the dog in When Evil Lurks (2023). Did you just flinch? Audition starts off surreptitiously when a man sets up auditions for a movie for his friend, but he’s not making a movie. The friend is trying to get him a date. It’s a very dichotomous movie, the first half is a filmmaking movie, the second half pure terror.
Miike’s other standouts for your writer anyway are Ichi the Killer (2001), The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001), and Blade of the Immortal (2017) featuring Hayato Ichihara as Shira who was also in Yakuza Apocalypse. Ichi, adapted from the Manga, is about a psychotic killer fighting rival Yakuza gangs. Happiness is The Sound of Music (1965) meets Hausu (1977), and Blade of the Immortal is filled with amazing swordfight scenes. There’s this one scene…back to Miike.
Miike is here at Director Roundup for a double whammy. Currently streaming is his latest work, an animated show called Nyaight of the Living Cat (2025). If that title sounds like another movie it’s meant to. The series is about a virus that turns people into…cats. Yep. I can’t believe I was allowed to write that sentence.
Film is a language that transcends all other languages with the capability of bringing together artists of all nations: Kurosawa adapting Shakespeare for feudal Japan; archetypes that drift from American Westerns to Japanese Samurai films to French Crime films; the global myth-sharing of Seven Samurai (1954)/Magnificent Seven (1960)/Battle Beyond the Stars (1980); the plot-sharing Red Harvest (book by Dashiell Hammett)/Yojimbo (1961)/A Fistful of Dollars (1964)/Last Man Standing (1996)/Ichi The Killer? (2001); or the simple fairy tale titles Once Upon a Time in America (1984)/the West (1968)/Mexico (2003)/China (1991)/Hollywood (2019).
And the latest? Like some species of cicada these monsters only show up after long intervals. It’s about sixteen years between these bad cop movies, whose summaries are right there in the title. Bad Lieutenant (1992) started it all, directed by Abel Ferrara and starring Harvey Keitel. Then Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009), directed by Werner Herzog and starring Nicolas Cage. And it’s Takashi Miike up next with Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo, starring Shun Oguri. Miike is a busy man. We cannot wait.
Killer Tomatoes
We’re gonna squeeze this one into Director Roundup for the hell of it. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (1979) broke records
Radio Silence: Chad Villella, Justin Martinez, Tyler Gillett, and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin.
In the future someone will write a book about today’s phenomenon of director teams in horror and genre film: Michael Philippou and Danny Philippou, Talk to Me (2022); Colin Cairnes and Cameron Cairnes, Late Night With the Devil (2023); Ross Duffer and Matt Duffer, Stranger Things; the Mo Brothers, Kimo Stamboel and Timo Tjahjanto, Macabre (2009); and the Coen Brothers, Joel and Ethan, who laid a strong foundation for these modern director teams.
And then there are the larger teams and companies. RKSS or better yet Roadkill Superstars, Yoann-Karl Whissel, Anouk Whissell, and François Simard, Turbo Kid (2015); and Astron 6, Steven Kostanski, Conor Sweeney, Matt Kennedy, Jeremy Gillespie, and Adam Brooks, who made Fathers’s Day (2011) and The Editor (2014) and a whole lot more in various team-ups and solo work.
Granted, this phenomenon may be no different than past circles of directing teams and/or companies. Romero worked with some of the same people, as does Raimi still, but it seems nowadays it’s more about these team members acknowledging each other as equal creators, as well as sharing the limelight, what little of it there is for genre films. Like the filmmakers who make up Radio Silence Productions: Chad Villella, Justin Martinez, Tyler Gillett, and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin.
The team wrote, directed, produced, and starred in the “10/31/98” segment of V/H/S (2012). And all four directed and produced the wraparound story “The Way In” and “The Way Out” for Southbound (2016). They worked together in varying capacities and varying combinations on Devil’s Due (2014), Ready or Not (2019), Scream (V) (2022), Scream VI (2023), and Abigail (2024). Villella, Gillett, and Bettinelli-Olpin receive producer credit for the V/H/S franchise, while Justin Martin works as a camera operator but more so in various visual effects capacities, Scare Package (2019), Portals (2019), Skylines (2020), Terrifier 3 (2024). Whew!
Well, they’re making a sequel to the film that brought them up a notch. It’s Ready or Not: Here I Come. The first Ready or Not was directed by Gillett and Bettinelli-Olpin with Villella executive producing. Martin was probably working on something else amazing. Gillett and Bettinelli-Olpin are directing and Villella executive producing.
R. Christopher Murphy and Guy Busick wrote the screenplay. They wrote three episodes of Dana Gould’s Stan Against Evil (2016-2018) and ten episodes of the tv series Castle Rock (2019). Busick wrote Scream (V) and Scream VI with James Vanderbilt, and Abigail with Stephen Shields. Murphy and Busick are both writing the sequel Here I Come.
The first movie stars Samara Weaving as a newlywed married into a family that plays deadly games. Weaving needs no introduction to horror fans, but why not. She’s a hard worker in the horror genre and has worked with other hard working horror and genre people, including three episodes of Ash vs Evil Dead (2015-2016) with the Raimi clan; Mayhem (2017), directed by Joe Lynch; The Babysitter (2017), directed by McG and written by Brian Duffield; Guns Akimbo (2019) from Deathgasm (2015) writer/director Jason Howden; Azrael (2024), directed by E. L. Katz, who also directed Cheap Thrills (2013), “A is for Amateur” in ABCs of Death 2 (2014), and episodes of Scream: The TV Series (2016), Channel Zero (2018)), and Swamp Thing (2019). This isn’t even half of Weaving’s filmography.
The first Ready or Not also stars Andy MacDowell but check out the cast for the sequel: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Elijah Wood, Weaving, and fricking David Cronenberg whose psycho killer in Nightbreed (1990) can never be matched as far as your writer is concerned.
Some sites claim Villella left Radio Silence, and Martin works regularly in visual effects of other films. It will be interesting watching these careers over the years. Will they stick together? Will all four reunite on one project? Regardless, I can’t wait to see what they make solo or as Radio Silence. In the meantime, we’re looking forward to Ready or Not: Here I Come (2026)
V/H/S
Speaking of the V/H/S franchise, we’re sure horror fans noticed V/H/S/Halloween on Shudder as of this writing. The V/H/S and ABCs of Death franchises, along with a few other anthologies, have paved the early careers of many modern horror directors. Let’s check out these V/H/S/Halloween filmmakers.
Anna Zlokovic wrote and directed several short films and created a story about a fashion designer who is having a Manster (1959)/How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989)/Army of Darkness (1992) problem when something grows and separates from her body. She wrote and directed Appendage as the season 2 episode 1 segment of Bite Size Halloween (2020-2021), and remade it as a feature, Appendage (2023). She wrote and directed the matriarchal urban legend segment, Coochie Coochie Coo, episode for V/H/S/Halloween.
Paco Plaza is mostly known for the original Spanish [REC] franchise. He wrote [Rec] (2007) with Jaume Balagueró and Luiso Berdejo and directed it with Balagueró. He wrote [REC] 2 with Balagueró and Manu Díaz, directing with Balagueró again. And he wrote [REC] 3: Genesis (2012) with David Gallart and again with Berdejo, while solo directing this one.
Check out his filmography though: Before those he directed a short Abuelitos (1999), which found its way into the anthology film Small Gauge Trauma (2006). He directed and wrote with Fernando Navarro and Coral Cruz the ouija board gone wrong Verónica (2017). He directed and Juan Galiñanes and Jorge Guerricaechevarría wrote the nursing home murder movie Quien a hierro mata/Eye for an Eye (2019). Plaza directed and Carlos Vermut wrote the creepy prodigal child returns home movie La abuela/The Grandmother (2021). And he directed and wrote with Jorge Guerricaechevarría the convent horror movie Hermana Muerte/Sister Death (2023). This guy likes to work. He directed the Ut Supra Sic Infra segment for V/H/S/Halloween, writing it with Alberto Marini about the lone survivor of a massacre.
Let me digress. Writer Jorge Guerricaechevarría is no stranger to horror screenplays. He cowrote, with Álex de la Iglesia, all sixteen episodes of the incredible horror series 30 Monedas/30 Coins (2020-2023). And with others he also wrote de la Iglesia’s Perdita Durango (1997), the great El día de la bestia/Day of the Beast (1995), Acción mutante/Mutant Action (1993), and also 800 balas/Eight Hundred Bullets (2002), and Las brujas de Zugarrmurdi/Witching and Bitching (2013). If Plaza is a hard worker, Guerricaechevarría is a workaholic.
Alex Ross Perry is the odd person out here. He is an all-around person–actor, writer, director, producer–who has a legitimate and impressive filmography writing and directing feature length films with major stars: Impolex (2009), The Color Wheel (2011), Listen Up Philip (2014), and that just touches on his work. Then he directed some music videos, most of them for Maya Hawke. He and Hawke also worked together on a nearly three-hour documentary Videoheaven (2025) about VHS in the 1980s, nothing to do with the V/H/S franchise. Hawke’s work on Stranger Things is Parry’s only connection to genre work. I’m very curious to see what seems to be his first horror work. He wrote and directed the kid I.D. gone wrong Kidprint segment for V/H/S/Halloween.
Bryan M. Ferguson wrote and directed a slew of shorts and some music videos. He directed six short films for the Bloody Disgusting/Screambox produced anthology series Bloody Bites (2020), including Satanic Panic ’87, The Shed, Insecticide, Sink, Ear Worm, and Red Room, all for 2024. Some of these were shorts of his or he rewrote them for the show. He directed the food side effects gone wrong segment Diet Phantasma for V/H/S/Halloween.
R. H. Norman directed a few short films on his own, then teamed up with Micheline Pitt for another short, Grummy (2021), for which they shared writing and directing duties. And they have something together in production titled Cosmetic about a girl obsessed with perfection. They wrote and directed the Home Haunt segment for V/H/S/Halloween. It’s a cursed LP movie. We need more of these. Please check out Svart cirkel/Black Circle (2018) from Night of the Wolf/Late Phases director Adrian Garcia Bogliano.
Casper Kelly is also an odd-person out for the V/H/S franchise, but I’m all in. He’s an Adult Swim veteran having written a few episodes of Harvey Birdman Attorney at Law (2002-2007), Aqua Teen Hunger Force (2000-2023), and twelve episodes of Squidbillies (2005-2021). Kelly and Jeffrey G. Olsen created Stroker and Hoop (2004-2005), cowriting all thirteen episodes. Then Kelly and Dave Willis created Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell, writing the pilot episode/tv movie (2011) which became an Adult Swim series (2022). Then again Kelly wrote or cowrote all 42 episodes and directed 23. Again again, Kelly teamed up with Jamie King to write the upcoming coming of age horror movie Buddy with Kelly directing. He directed the Fun Size episode for V/H/S/Halloween. It looks like a candy horror story.
V/H/S/Beyond (2024) felt like a good reboot. Let’s hope they continue with this one.
See you next time.