An unre­alised Aki­ra Kuro­sawa project is final­ly being made

The Chi­nese enter­tain­ment com­pa­ny Huayi Broth­ers Media have revealed a num­ber of new projects, includ­ing The Masque of the Black Death, based on an unfilmed script by one of the all-time great direc­tors, Aki­ra Kurosawa.

The mas­ter Japan­ese film­mak­er began writ­ing the screen­play short­ly com­plet­ing his 1975 epic Der­su Uza­la. The script was fin­ished before his death in 1998, but it nev­er went into production.

The film is an adap­ta­tion of the Edgar Allen Poe short sto­ry ​‘The Masque of the Red Death’, which fol­lows a prince’s attempts to avoid a dan­ger­ous plague known as ​‘the Red Death’, by hid­ing in his abbey. The prince hosts a mas­quer­ade ball along with oth­er nobles with­in the abbey, until a mys­te­ri­ous fig­ure suf­fer­ing from the plague appears.

It won’t be the first time Poe’s sto­ry has been adapt­ed for the screen, with Roger Cor­man hav­ing direct­ed Vin­cent Price in a 1964 ver­sion. There’s also a 1989 remake, and var­i­ous pro­duc­tions for the stage, radio and numer­ous com­ic books.

The screen­play, which is now avail­able to read online, sig­nif­i­cant­ly expands on the orig­i­nal sto­ry, with the far-reach­ing plague giv­ing the film an apoc­a­lyp­tic set­ting. Accord­ing to Aki­ra Kuro­sawa Info, the script was not intend­ed as a fin­ished draft but rather an exer­cise in recre­at­ing the orig­i­nal story.

No direc­tor has been attached to the project yet, but the stu­dio is report­ed­ly seek­ing a young film­mak­er, and a ten­ta­tive release date is set for 2020. See­ing an expand­ed ver­sion of this short sto­ry will pro­vide audi­ences with a rare win­dow into the artis­tic process of this high­ly influ­en­tial film­mak­er, 20 years after his death.