Peter Jackson Would Be Very Happy To Be Disgusting Again

Peter Jackson is mostly known now for his Lord of the Rings epics, but he launched his career creating ultra-gory horror-comedies that turned him into a kind of cult legend. Jackson hasn't returned to the horror genre since 1996's The Frighteners (unless you want to count King Kong as horror) but that doesn't mean his gross-out days are done. The filmmaker is restoring his early splatter films, which has inspired him to admit he'd love to be "disgusting again."

Will we ever see a new Peter Jackson horror movie? Maybe! Jackson recently used his Weta Digital VFX studio to restore old World War I footage for the documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, and he decided to use the same tech on his early horror films, like Braindead (aka Dead Alive) and Bad Taste. 

"I've decided to go back and do this to my old films," Jackson says in a new interview with THR. "I've done some tests on Braindead, where we took the 16mm negative and put it through our World War I restoration pipeline — and shit, it looks fantastic!" The filmmaker added: "I'm pretty keen to actually just get them back out there again. That's sort of my plan for now: to do a nice little box set — the early years! The naughty years!"

All this talk of going back to his splatter-punk roots prompted the interviewer to ask Jackson if he might make a new horror movie sometime in the future, and Jackson wasn't opposed to the idea:

"Oh, I'm very happy to be disgusting again if the right project comes along...It would be interesting to see how disgusting Fran [Walsh] and I could be in our older age compared to our younger years because we've learned a few things since then. We know a little bit more about the world than we did then, so maybe our levels of disgusting could go into whole new places!"

I would personally love to see Jackson return to gory, gross-out horror, especially if he were to use practical effects like in the old days. The more disgusting, the better. "Our only philosophy was that we were going to be as disgusting as we possibly could," Jackson said, regarding his early days. "And we didn't have any studio types on set or reading with us, because there was no script to read, really — we were just writing it as we went along." If you'd like to go back to the glory days of Jackson's gruesomeness, please watch this clip.