Back in 1997 New Line Cinema‘s brought comic book anti-hero, Spawn, to the silverscreen. While the film raked in $19 mil opening weekend, it received widely negative reviews from critics. Their biggest gripe was, although the film brought the violence, its PG-13 rating prevented it from matching the explicit nature of the source material it was based on. Well, it appears the comic creator, Todd McFarlane is bringing Spawn back from the dead (pun totally intended) and has a script that will be a lot different from the 1997 film.

McFarlane told ComicBook:

“I’ve finished the script, and I’m in the process of editing. It’s 183 pages, and [producers] usually like 120. I still think it’s going to end up being about 140, because I’m putting in details for myself.”

So we expect this film will not be a sequel, but a complete reboot of the series — sorry Michael Jai White. This one won’t fit so neatly into the “Superhero” film genre however, according to McFarlane.

“I’d put it more into horror/suspense/supernatural genre. If you take the movie The Departed meets ParanormalActivity, something like that. I want to keep it small, keep it tight, so they’ll let me direct it!”

In the background, there’s this thing moving around, this boogeyman. That boogeyman just happens to be something that you and I, intellectually, know is Spawn. Will he look like he did in the first movie? No. Will he have a supervillain he fights? No. He’s going to be the spectre, the ghost.”

The Departed meets Paranormal Activity? For some reason this sounds promising.