It’s always cool when we have the chance to watch action heroes venture into horror territory. We’ve seen Arnold Schwarzenegger take on the Predator, battle Satan (in End of Days), and raise a zombie daughter (in Maggie). Sylvester Stallone has taken on psycho killers in Cobra and Eye See You (and we’re still waiting for him to get around to making that creature feature Hunter, which he once considered turning into a Rambo sequel). Charles Bronson tracked a serial killer in 10 to Midnight. Dolph Lundgren faced off with an alien drug dealer in I Come in Peace. Jean-Claude Van Damme played both a serial killer and the killer’s heroic clone in Replicant. Steven Seagal killed vampires in Against the Dark. The list goes on… but two separate action horror projects we tragically missed out on would have given us the sight of both Van Damme and Seagal fighting Yetis, a.k.a. Abominable Snowmen!
Back in 1995, Universal Pictures purchased a screenplay by Troy Neighbors and Steven Fienberg that told the story of a United Nations task force investigating the mysterious disappearance of Red Cross workers in the Himalayas. Needless to say, they encounter more than soldiers from the People’s Republic of China. Titled Abominable, this project was described as “Predator in the snow” and was going to be produced by Moshe Diamant. Peter Hyams, who worked with Van Damme on Timecop and Sudden Death, was considered for the directing job, and so was Cliffhanger’s Renny Harlin. Van Damme was on board to play a UN task force member who would end up having to fight a Yeti, or Yetis. Unfortunately, he had other projects to get to before production could start on Abominable, and eventually Universal lost interest in making a Van Damme vs. the Abombinable Snowman movie. The fools.
Seagal’s own Yeti project, titled Snow Blind, was set up at Warner Bros. Speaking on a podcast, screenwriter Ethan Dettenmaier recently revealed exactly how Snow Blind came about. Dettenmaier went to Seagal’s house to meet with him about a different project that Seagal ended up turning down because “some people he knew in the black ops community” would be upset with him if he made the movie. Instead, he wanted to make a horror movie and told Dettenmaier, “If you can write like I write, then you should have a script to me in about 24 hours.”
On the podcast, Dettenmaier says Seagal “got wind that we knew some of the members of the group En Vogue and he really wanted to rope them into some kind of co-starring role, which was really awkward. I go, ‘I’m not getting you a script in 24 hours, but I’ll get you some ideas.’ Two or three days later, he calls me and goes, ‘So what do you have for me?’ And I go down this list of ideas, start with the strong ones, they’re all horror-based ideas, Corman-esque. I get to the last one, and it’s probably the weakest. When you’re trying to round out a list of content, you’re gonna have the powerful ones up front and you’re gonna want to sound extensive, so you start getting weaker and weaker and weaker as the list progresses. I get to the last, item number 25: Diplomatic flight in the Himalayas goes down, Empire Strikes Back type Yeti comes up, pops in and out of the frame like Jaws, tears it apart, you’re the Special Forces guy that’s gotta go in, and we’ll call it Snow Blind. ‘That’s the one we’ll do!’ And he goes like this, ‘Those creatures do exist and the reason nobody sees them is because they have the ability to transcend dimensions.’”
So, for a while, Seagal was on board to fight dimension-transcending Yetis in Snow Blind. But, like Universal with Abominable, Warner Bros. did not end up sending the project into production.
How do Abominable and Snow Blind sound to you? Do you wish we had gotten these Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal vs. Yetis movies? Let us know by leaving a comment below.