In hindsight, Wes Craven’s 1991 film The People Under The Stairs is exactly the kind of movie that should get remade. An unmistakable product of its time whose political component was impossible to ignore, the film revolves around a pair of deranged sadists overtly modeled on Ronald and Nancy Reagan who hoard their riches while the people around them starve and suffer the torments of the damned.

At its best, the film has the primal power of a politically charged fairy tale, with the Reagan figures as the ghoulish bad guys, but mostly it was a mess, a clumsy combination of ham-fisted leftist rage and clumsy storytelling. The film was an enormous commercial hit all the same and became a major cult hit, yet never spawned a sequel despite its seemingly sequel-friendly mythology involving the titular creatures and their sorrowful existence.

Today brings news that the story of The People Under The Stairs is going to continue not on the big screen, where Craven has been AWOL for a while, but rather as a TV series on Syfy. Variety reports that the veteran frightmaster has signed a first-look deal with Universal Cable Productions that includes developing a television adaptation of The People Under The Stairs (which also inspired the name of a pretty great hip-hop duo), as well as writing and directing an adaptation of the Daryl Gregory novel We Are All Completely Fine, which is about an “enigmatic psychologist who gathers survivors of five horror movie scenarios in a support group—only to unlock the evils of her patients’ pasts.”

The article describes The People Under The Stairs as “a contemporary Downton Abbey meets Amityville Horror.” That sure doesn’t sound like the movie I saw as a kid, but if there is one immutable law of show business it’s that you can never go wrong comparing your project to recent successes. (Although in the case of The Amityville Horror, the recent success would be the remake, not the original.)

Beyond those two projects, Craven is developing Disciples, which takes place in a future where the super-wealthy have taken to colonizing the moons of the solar system, apparently having run out of countries on earth to exploit. Craven will be executive-producing with Steven Niles, who wrote the graphic novel the show is based on.

Where most accomplished horror filmmakers are seemingly kicking back and letting kids remake their early work for a new generation, it seems like Craven is busier than ever, if not in his original medium. It’s nice to see Craven working so much, but the movie world could use another Craven film as well, assuming its not Scream 5 or Music Of The Heart Too.