John Landis, the veteran director who made blockbuster movies Animal House, Trading Places and the Blues Brothers, is lined up to make a black comedy for Ealing Studios about Edinburgh's most famous serial killers Burke and Hare.
Hollywood movie industry magazine Variety reports that the feature film, a black comedy, will be Landis first since Blues Brothers 2000 in 1998. Shooting is due to commence in Spring here in Edinburgh and London at Ealing Studios.
Screenwriter on the project is reportedly Piers Ashworth, who wrote Sherlock (2002) and the adaptation of the classic schoolgirl television series St. Trinian's which proved to be a big box office success on its release last year.
Burke and Hare are often referred to as grave-robbers, or as that criminal profession was known at the time, "resurrectionists". It's true that, in the early 19th century, demand for cadavers to satisfy Edinburgh's growing ranks of medical students had led to a perplexing and reviled boom in grave-robbing (questions were rarely asked by the medical authorities about the origins of corpses), but the two immigrant labourers went a step further.
Beween 1827 and their capture in 1828, Burke and Hare murdered some 17 people and sold the fresh corpses to the medical school. Burke and Hare's modus operandi was to get their victims drunk and suffocate them in Hare's lodging house in Edinburgh's West Port.
There have been a variety of films on the subject of the murderous duo: Oswald Mitchell's 1948 The Greed of William Hart and Vernon Sewell's 1972 Burke & Hare cast the two as grave-robbers in Edinburgh low-life horrors. It will be interesting to be see how true to the original story Landis's film can be while wringing laughs from the grim material.