Rob Zombie has announced that he plans to make The Lords of Salem his next project.  The film will be a thriller set in contemporary Salem, where the inhabitants receive a demonic visit from a 300-year old coven of witches.”  Zombie will be writing the screenplay while on tour and plans to shoot the film next year.  Hit the jump to find out what made Zombie stop his plans to remake The Blob.

Zombie says that he came up with the idea for The Lords of Salem years ago, but returned back to the idea while working on his planned remake of The Blob.  For those of you that don’t know, the director announced last year that he had plans to remake the 1958 Steve McQueen classic with a budget akin to Cloverfield and District 9.  Not much was known about what his take on the film was going to be like, but he did say that he had plans to change the design of the blob itself.  The director said “That gigantic Jello-looking thing might have been scary to audiences in the 1950s, but people would laugh now.”

Now, it looks like we won’t be seeing his version of The Blob anytime soon.  While speaking with Deadline, Zombie cited his experiences with remaking Halloween as the main reason for why he left the project.  He said:  “I wanted to break away from anything related to preexisting material. The remake train is getting pretty tired now and when I made Halloween, everybody complained, either that it was too much like the original or too different. I like that people either love or hate what I do because it’s better than being in the middle, which means forgettable. But when you do an original premise, they take it on face value and after three years of not being able to win on Halloween, I just couldn't go through that again.”

I’m personally glad to see that Zombie is thinking this way since I believe that Zombie is wasting any talent that he has by remaking past classics.  Plus, I never got the reason for remaking The Blob since the 1988 remake is, in my opinion, superior to the original film.  Anyway, I’m hoping that Lords of Salem turns out to be a good experience for Zombie, and that we get to see the talent that he showed he had with The Devil’s Rejects again.