Dario does Dracula?

So, the news from Cannes is that Argento's next movie will be a 3D version of Dracula that hews closely to Bram Stoker's novel. Argento seems to have been thinking about 3D for a while; last year a flurry of rumors had him making a 3D remake of Deep Red. There's no casting, but Dracula is apparently supposed to start shooting in January 2011.

I'd like to be thrilled, but the best I can manage is cautious optimism. After all, Argento was profoundly influenced by seeing the 1943 version of Phantom of the Opera, but his own 1998 Phantom was, shall we say, deeply flawed. Back in the '70s Argento talked about making a WWII-era Frankenstein that equated the monster's creation with the rise of Nazism; it got to the script stage and attracted the attention of Timothy "One-Time Bond" Dalton. Co-writer Luigi Cozzi claims the project fell apart because Universal executives decided that "Frankenstein was dead and anyway, no one who wanted to see a horror movie cared about politics."

But I've never heard Argento express the slightest interest in Dracula. Still, you never know...