Adam Green discusses abandoned Hatchet 4 pitch

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

I love slasher movies, and I had a lot of fun with the HATCHET films, watching Kane Hodder tear through three films worth of victims as deformed, swamp-dwelling revenant Victor Crowley. HATCHET franchise mastermind Adam Green, who wrote all three films and directed the first two, has always said that he envisioned the series as a trilogy, but while the third movie had a bit more finality to its ending than its predecessors did, this is a slasher we're dealing with. They always return, even when the titles of their films promise that we've seen the "final" entry.

Green has seemed uncertain about the possibility of there ever being a HATCHET 4, but in the latest episode of the podcast The Movie Crypt, which he co-hosts with WRONG TURN 2 / EVERLY director Joe Lynch, he mentions that he did at one point pitch an idea for a fourth film to distributor Dark Sky Films. An idea that got shot down for a couple different reasons.

The guest on this episode is filmmaker Patrick Lussier, who edited WES CRAVEN'S NEW NIGHTMARE. The NEW NIGHTMARE connection is what leads Green to discuss the abandoned HATCHET 4 idea, as one of the reasons why he decided not to do it is because he didn't want people comparing it to NEW NIGHTMARE.

Green's pitch for HATCHET 4 was to take it meta:

It plays with the idea of Victor Crowley actually being a real thing, I lied and said I made it up but I really stole the story and now he's coming to get everybody who worked on the movie. But he doesn't really look like he did in the three — he's really scary, it's a little more paranormal. I just figured to go out with a bang and make it real and make it grounded and make him terrifying and not campy would have been really cool…"

Another reason why that version of HATCHET 4 is never likely to get off the ground is that Dark Sky felt it would officially end the series, and it's always best to keep the door open for more sequels.

I don't really agree that making a meta sequel would be a dead end for the series, though. It could be treated as a one-off, and another sequel could always return to the continuity of the first three HATCHETs, just like the regular Freddy Krueger returned in FREDDY VS. JASON after NEW NIGHTMARE.

I would love to see a HATCHET 4 get made, and while I would prefer that it just remain in the same reality as the first three, there is some appeal to the idea of watching "the real Victor Crowley" go after Green and Hodder and others who were involved with the series, like Danielle Harris and Tony Todd. It could be entertaining.

What do you think? Would you like to see a HATCHET 4? If so, do you like the meta idea, or should it just be more of the Crowley we know destroying people in Honey Island Swamp?

Green isn't the only one who delves into a lost project on this particular episode. Lussier and his DRIVE ANGRY / MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3D collaborator Todd Farmer were attached to the HELLRAISER remake for a while and came up with multiple different takes on that material. During the podcast, Lussier describes the opening sequence of a version that would have starred William Fichtner as a Jack Bauer type who becomes the new Pinhead.

All that and two hours more of interesting conversation are contained in Movie Crypt episode #128.