On In Sickness and In Health
On Thursday, June 26th, NBC airs In Sickness and In Health, a John Landis-directed episode of Fear Itself. In it, Maggie Lawson plays a bride-to-be who, on her wedding day, receives a note that ominously reveals “The person you are marrying is a serial killer.” Jeepers Creepers‘ creator Victor Salva penned the Hitchockian scenario.
“It’s much more of a throwback, it’s almost a woman’s picture,” Landis tells us. “It’s a girl in jeopardy picture. It has really no elements of the supernatural and it entirely sits on Maggie’s shoulders.” He says you can also expect a dark streak of humor, akin to what you may have seen in his early Masters of Horror episodes Deer Woman and Family. “It’s hard to approach this stuff without a sense of humor. But I think that’s true of every genre. [Look at] Hitchcock’s Psycho? Norman Bates says, ‘Mother’s not herself today.'”
Originally, Landis was scheduled to helm an episode entitled Community, however, “I was preparing another script and I had to abandon it because I was working on a film. Mary Harron directed that one and when I became available, they gave me two scripts – of the two I liked Victor’s better.” Landis’ previous foray in small screen frights, the aforementioned Deer Woman, paired him with son Max (pictured) who wrote the script. For Fear Itself, the two went off in different directions. Landis felt he took too much credit for the Masters of Horror entry when it was Max who cooked up the story, so, “[Max] wrote an episode that Ernest Dickerson directed, a different take on the werewolf legend. It’s a terrific script.”
As for the future, Landis does not have an immediate feature film plans although he is attached to do a William Gaines biopic (details) and he’s still on board the long-mooted Batboy film. “There was an Off-Broadway show done several years ago – it was great, really well-received, it was called Batboy. Well, it’s a terrific show and I’m attached to it to make it into a movie. That would be great because that’s a classic Opereta with rock music and country music, it’s an insane story. It’s like Beauty & the Beast and Phantom of the Opera and Dracula, it’s a really funny show and I’d love to do that.”
Source: Ryan Rotten
