Something's rotten in the state of Lifetime. The network has really been pumping out their horror content lately. And just when it seemed like remaking MOTHER, MAY I SLEEP WITH DANGER? as a lesbian vampire movie was the craziest idea, they were working on, along comes Midsummer Nightmare, a series that is currently in development.
The plan is for Midsummer Nightmare to become a Shakespearean anthology horror series, with each season presenting a horrific spin on a different Shakespeare play. Honestly, there's a lot of material to work with here. "Titus Andronicus" is a brutally gory tale that culminates in a man baking his enemy's sons into pies and feeding them to her, then stabbing his daughter to death. "Macbeth" is all about witchery and bloody murder. And "Hamlet" opens with a ghostly visitation, for crying out loud.
It worked well enough for Vincent Price in THEATRE OF BLOOD (a wholly underrated flick where a Shakespearean actor murders his critics in Shakespeare-inspired ways), but my worry would be that they turn it into a Once Upon a Time-type, watered-down trifle with hot teens and wooden dialogue.
The Anthony Jaswinski-penned (KRISTY, THE SHALLOWS) first season based on "A Midsummer Night's Dream" would be
a story that finds two young lovers on a getaway in the woods who wind up in a struggle to survive as friends arrive to lure them home.
So basically Puck is a will-o'-the-wisp type forest monster? Honestly, it could be worse. More on this story as it breaks!