Kevin Smith has announced that he’s retooling his Christmas horror comedy Comes The Krampus, after the film became a victim of the infamous Krampus movie rush of Winter 2015. Refusing to be cowed, Smith has stripped out the film’s Christmas elements, repurposed its monster, and now announced that the movie has become a horror anthology flick, titled KillRoy Was Here.
The anthology’s name comes from the famous “Kilroy Was Here” graffiti that became popular in America circa World War II. (Apparently, the film’s long-nosed monster resembles the cute little guy.) Smith has cast the film as a kind of gory morality play, noting that, “No one wants to see you spill the blood of innocents, but when someone crosses the line and goes bad, you get to make them pay in horrible ways, and the audience cheers.”
Smith’s last two films, Tusk and Yoga Hosers, were both incredibly messy efforts, albeit ones occasionally livened up with utterly bizarre ideas and visuals. We’re keeping our fingers crossed that the shift to a more vignette-based filmmaking style will suit Smith’s current cinematic attention span, allowing him to cram more gross-out spectacle and strange ideas into Killroy without so much of the meandering padding (or, god help us, Johnny Depp cameos) that diluted his most recent work.