Del Toro sends Larry Fessenden to ‘The Orphanage’

This is the kind of move that will definitely kick up a career a notch. Longtime low budget horror filmmaker and producer (and actor!) Larry Fessenden (The Last Winter) will slide into the director’s chair for New Line Cinema’s remake of the popular Spanish The Orphanage. A friend and fellow horror fan to Guillermo del Toro, THR reports that Fessenden actually wrote the script with Mexican filmmaker.

New Line quickly picked up the rights in September of 2007 on the tale about a woman who takes over the orphanage where she was raised to open a home for disabled children. Then her young son begins to play with the same imaginary friend who terrorized her when she was a child.

In order for this film to have a shot at success, I think that not only do we need a title change here, but we need Fessenden and del Toro to promote the case that we can expect the outcome to be different – if that is indeed the case. Unlike the type of situation where a foreign film makes a minor bleep on the radar, Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Orphanage made great waves with a domestic take for Picturehouse. It will take more than a re-shuffling of the cards and a Hamptons locale a la Funny Games to make this worth a watch.

What are your thoughts on the remake?