It will be interesting, then, to see what Matheson thinks of STIR OF ECHOES: THE HOMECOMING, the sequel which makes its debut this Saturday, August 11 at 9 p.m. on Sci Fi Channel, before winding its way to DVD via Lionsgate in November. While not a direct follow-up to Koepp’s feature, THE HOMECOMING aims to stay true to the themes and tone of the celebrated source novel. Shot in Toronto, Canada last August, the movie was written and directed by Ernie (CUBE ZERO) Barbarash and replaces Bacon with former Brat Packer Rob (THE STAND) Lowe, playing an all-new character plagued by aggressively vengeful beings from beyond the grave.

“At the time I was offered to direct the film, I was actually shopping around to do a ghost movie,” reveals Barbarash. “Once I signed on, however, we went through a development process that included me rewriting a very different screenplay than what [Lionsgate] originally had. I felt it would be much more interesting to do another character-based ghost film rather than try to follow the same family around, just to retell what was essentially the same story.”

On the day Fango visits the HOMECOMING set, it’s hot. Sweltering, even. The kind of humid, pollution-drenched Toronto summer heat that makes you want to claw off your own skin. The morning’s location is a burned-out industrial building in the southeast end, one of those great, faceless ramshackle structures that local and visiting filmmakers tend to dress up as whatever interior they desire. Today, this particular building is being used as a hotel of sorts. It’s a shadowy, roach-littered fleabag dive where Captain Ted Cogan (Lowe) comes to sort out his particular preternatural psychosis. Cogan is a returning Iraq war veteran, whose accidental slaughter of innocent Iraqi civilians, specifically a mother and child, in the line of duty has sparked a wave of ghostly terror that threatens to push him over the edge and beyond the pale. Enter psychic Jake Witzky (Zachary Bennett), the son of Bacon’s character from the first film, and the only one alive who might be able to help Cogan. Though of course, in the shadowy world of STIR OF ECHOES, all is not what it seems.

Outside of functioning as a thematic sequel to both Matheson’s book and Koepp’s film, THE HOMECOMING’s basic premise has strong, well, echoes of both Bob Clark’s seminal postwar shocker DEATHDREAM and Joe Dante’s recent satirical, anti-Bush MASTERS OF HORROR installment, similarly titled HOMECOMING. Yet Barbarash claims no influence from these pictures.

“My wife has a lot of family in the military, actually,” admits the filmmaker, “and by setting this story during combat, I felt I could also convey my own personal feelings about the war. This is a supernatural tale, a ghost story, but it’s also my perspective on the world around me personally. Even though it might bother some people, I didn’t take a black-and-white, right-or-wrong stance to morality during wartime.”

Much like the protagonist in the initial novel and film, and indeed like many of the main characters in Matheson’s expansive body of work, Lowe’s Captain Cogan is essentially an everyday Joe, a regular American with a family who faces an arcane situation and must adapt to it. Yet unlike many quickie sequels lensed to knock off their recognizable brand-name sources, Barbarash promises that THE HOMECOMING plays strictly by the rules of the source.

“This film is totally in line with Matheson’s book and the original movie,” he says, “and not just because we bring back a key character from the first one. I loved the book, I really did, and I wanted to honor it. I want to make this movie kind of come into its own without breaking any of Matheson’s, or even David Koepp’s, structure and tone.”

But while the first ECHOES favored a less visceral approach, THE HOMECOMING appears to boast more than its share of graphic gore. Special makeup FX designer Matthew Dewilde is up to his spleen in splatter. “There are tons of gross-out gags and prosthetic stuff in this film,” notes Dewilde, who along with his wife and partner SheilaghL McGrory, make up the prolific Dewilde Productions team. “We have a series of dead war veterans—not zombies, actually, but more bloody ghosts with slit-open faces, torn throats, really moist stuff. We’re also doing extensive, graphic burn makeups and a nasty scene where Rob Lowe’s arm blisters and pops. Truthfully, there’s more gore than usual in this. Yesterday, we blew some lady’s head off—real Tom Savini/DAWN OF THE DEAD-style splatter.”

Dewilde, whose credits include HEARTSTOPPER, THE LAST SECT and the upcoming multihorror-star vehicle FALLEN ANGELS, has seen a spike in demand recently for more tangible, in-camera, visceral horror FX. This move away from more economical, arguably less effective digital mayhem is a trend that THE HOMECOMING aims to adhere to.

“Audiences want to see something more ‘real’ in the movies they watch,” Dewilde notes. “I mean, CGI was helping me quite a lot, because I didn’t have to do so much mechanical work, and we could even go farther with making the impossible possible. But I’m definitely seeing a backlash, especially with horror. I’ve been going back to some really crude methods, to the way I worked in the ’80s. And in THE HOMECOMING, Ernie wanted that ‘reality,’ that sense that you could actually touch everything. Because of that, this has been one of the more demanding prosthetic pictures I’ve done in some time. And man, let me tell you…I’ve made more blood in the last week than I have in years!”

Rounding out the STIR OF ECHOES: THE HOMECOMING cast are Shawn Roberts (the busy Canadian actor from LAND OF THE DEAD, SKINWALKERS and the upcoming DIARY OF THE DEAD), Kim Roberts and Tatiana (GINGER SNAPS: UNLEASHED) Maslany. But make no mistake, this is Barbarash’s show. The writer/director is hoping that fright fans will appreciate the efforts he’s made to create a picture that doesn’t insult their intelligence and gets under their skin on a number of levels, both visceral and emotional. And what of the ever-critical Matheson?