'Cloverfield' Director Looks to Short Story that Inspired 'They Live' for Next Film

It's sort of a testament to director John Carpenter's ability to channel effective concepts into cinematic legacies that his films keep being remade. Of the ten theatrical movies he made from 1976 to 1988, six have either been remade, or have remakes at some stage of production.

If the films themselves aren't effectively living on - the original "The Fog" doesn't get a lot of play these days - the imagery, titles, and concepts certainly still pack a punch.

So it is with "They Live," one of Carpenter's more insane pictures from this period (which is really saying something). A blatant piece of sci-fi propaganda, Carpenter's film was about a man (played by none other than "Rowdy" Roddy Piper) who finds a pair of sunglasses that allow him to see a hidden world wrought with messages from aliens that slowly, subliminally make us their slaves.

The aliens, of course, are all members of the upper class, and the messages are things like "This is your God" (on a dollar bill) or "Obey" (on a billboard).

It's also become famous for having one of the longest fight scenes in film history - a five-and-a-half minute fistfight between Piper and Keith David, which is exactly as awesome as it sounds.

Now "Cloverfield" and "Let Me In" director Matt Reeves is heading back to the short story that inspired it all for his next film.

Deadline reports that Reeves has signed at Universal to write and direct a film based on "8 O'Clock in the Morning," Ray Nelson's 1963 short story. That version, as it did not take place in the 1980s, had nothing to do with magic sunglasses, and Reeves' film will be a more straightforward adaptation.

"I saw an opportunity to do a movie that was very point-of-view driven, a psychological science fiction thriller that explores this guy's nightmare," Reeves told Deadline.

"There could be a desperate love story at the center of this. Carpenter took a satirical view of the material and the larger political implication that we're being controlled. I am very drawn to the emotional side, the nightmare experience with the paranoia of 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' or a Roman Polanski-style film."

There are few better ways to get me onboard than to say you're making a sci-fi film with a Polanski influence, and unlike most projects that announce themselves as "re-adaptations of the source material" to avoid the dreaded "remake" label, this really does seem like its own thing. Carpenter's version was a pretty drastic, personal departure from the source, and while I'm not surprised a studio would shy away from the political implications, it will be exciting to see a new take on the story by a very talented director.

Now let's see if the studio has the guts to use the short story's title!