Continuing the grand ’70s tradition of Italians ripping off international entertainment trends (see: The Exorcist and Beyond The Door), Deadline reports that a French and an Italian production company are combining forces to produce rebooted TV versions of two genre classics: Sergio Corbucci’s iconic 1966 spaghetti Western Django and Suspiria De Profundis, a collection of fantasy essays published in 1845 by English writer Thomas De Quincey that served as the inspiration for Dario Argento’s 1977 masterpiece Suspiria.
The TV version of Django is envisioned as a 12-episode “re-imagining” of the original film, about a gunslinger burdened by his tragic past—and the coffin he drags around with him everywhere—who does battle with the Ku Klux Klan in an even-muddier-than-usual frontier town. Django inspired a legion of ripoffs and imitators, including—by his own admission—Quentin Tarantino’s 2013 film Django Unchained, which took out the coffin but left the gunplay and KKK parts intact. Tarantino has promised/threatened to turn his Django movie into a four-hour miniseries, meaning that if this 12-episode version goes through, he’ll have to go back and make a 16-hour version just to stay ahead of the game.
The TV version of Suspiria, which will also run for 12 episodes, sounds less straightforward. Deadline describes it as a detective series that re-imagines author De Quincey as ”a new Sherlock Holmes” who solves spooky supernatural mysteries, because no one has ever thought to do something like that before. Even worse, Dario Argento, who directed the original Suspiria and lost his touch some time ago, is set to serve as the show’s artistic supervisor. At least David Gordon Green’s widely reviled and ultimately ill-fated Suspiria remake appears to be dead in the water, three years after casting Orphan’s Isabelle Fuhrman in the lead role. Speaking of dead in the water, maybe they’ll make an Inferno TV series next…