Horror Movie Pitch

Ever since the folks that produce mainstream horror movies decided that the obvious next step beyond torture porn was to “reimagine” the classics for a next-generation audience (not that they’re all bad – but the vast majority of ‘em are, yeah, pretty bad), I’ve been on the lookout for a foolproof remake pitch that nobody else could cook up. And, thanks to a little inspiration via the current, ridiculous anti-Orphan outcry from people who apparently know the difference between reality and fiction, but think that other people might not, I think I’ve got just the thing.

I’m going to acquire the rights to one of the greatest pieces of satire ever written – Jonathan Swift’s 1729 essay “A Modest Proposal” – and “reimagine” it for a hip, young contemporary audience. And if I have to change a few of the less important points and contexts, well, then, that’s just an improvement, right? Instead of the simultaneously facetious and lethally pointed suggestion that the starving citizens of the nation turn to eating their own young, the filmed adaptation A Modest Proposal will be the harrowing story of a pair of orphans and a janitor from a huge Chicago adoption institution who get suspicious about the way that the kids over about seven or eight years old suddenly experience a huge surge in popularity – they’re being adopted (well, disappearing from the orphanage, anyway) at an incredible rate. Through their own investigations, the brave, intrepid trio discover that the institution is actually selling the older, “marginally unadoptable” kids to a sketchy baby-broker, who in turn is selling them to a crazed philanthropist who’s feeding them to the city’s homeless population. Naturally, there are the scowling, suspicious bureaucrats, and it’s too early to tell if one of our protagonists will pay for the discovery with his or her life (becoming chow, of course). But it’ll raise some serious questions about the problems of unwanted children and the homeless, or something, and there’ll be plenty of gratuitous shots of kids being fed into pulp-covered machinery. Oh, and we’ll fit some boobs in there somewhere.

Because that’s the same, right? I mean, basically. Or close enough, whatever.