Hack/Slash lands Conan director

Hack/Slash fans rejoice, it seems that the long awaited adaptation of Tim Seeley's action-horror comic by Relativity Media may be one step closer to happening.

According to Heat Vision, Marcus Nispel, who directed last summer's Conan the Barbarian, has come aboard to helm Hack/Slash, Relativity’s adaptation of a horror-action comic book. Alexandra Milchan, Adrian Askarieh and Daniel Alter are producing.

Debuting in 2004 at Devil’s Due Publishing, the series centers on Cassie Hack, the symbolic “final girl” of slasher films who survives the killing spree. Instead of curling up into a ball after surviving the horrors, she turns the table to hunt down the slashers themselves with her partner, a hulking, disfigured man named Vlad. The title has been published by Image Comics since 2010.

“I appreciate the many congrats on the H/S movie news,” Seeley wrote last night on Twitter. “It still may mean a hot jack-shit injection, but, I thank you anyway! Things to consider: Marcus Nispel is a really nice guy, he actually reads the H/S comic, and he has an amazing beard.”

Universal’s Rogue Pictures acquired the film rights to Hack/Slash in 2006, with Todd Lincoln (The Apparition) set to direct from a script first by Martin Schenk (Blast) and later by Ben Magid (Pan) and then Justin Marks (Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li). In 2009 Rogue was bought by Relativity Media. Lincoln was replaced with Swedish commercial director Fredrik Bond, and hired Stephen Susco (The Grudge, The Grudge 2) to take a stab at the script.

There had been no visible movement on the project since then, although Heat Vision notes that Nispel “briefly flirted” with Hack/Slash while Bond was still attached.

Nispel would seem like a good match for the slasher-hunting duo, having directed the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the 2009 reboot of Friday the 13th. He also helmed the 2007 remake of the Norwegian Viking film Pathfinder and the 2004 television movie based on Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein.