Kiss co-founder Gene Simmons has announced his involvement in a new film company, Erebus Pictures, that's partnering with WWE Studios to produce horror movies under a three-picture co-production deal.

Billboard broke the news of the deal, quoting Simmons as saying, "The horror genre continues to fascinate me as it proves to be endlessly thrilling and engaging for audiences."

The Erebus/WWE partnership is scheduled to make its debut with Temple, the tale of "a team of operatives trapped inside an isolated military compound after its artificial intelligence shuts down. While investigating the source of the malfunction, the crew experiences strange phenomena as they attempt to uncover who or what killed the team previously stationed at the compound."

As the report notes, Simmons' Erebus venture comes on the heels of his production investment in the upcoming Kiss documentary You Wanted the Best, You Got the Best, planned for release later this year. As fans of the band are well aware, Simmons has had an interest in filmmaking for quite some time;  his Hollywood ambitions were even once a major sticking point for his partner Paul Stanley, who admitted to feeling like he'd been left with the heavy lifting in the group during a portion of the '80s.

"I felt abandoned," Stanley wrote in his Face the Music memoir regarding the sessions for 1984's Animalize. "After informing me without any warning or discussion that he wouldn’t be around for the album, Gene went into a studio and crapped out some demos as fast as he could. Then he was off to do a movie [the Tom Selleck-starring Runaway]. He left me with a pile of mostly unusable junk."

These days, Simmons and Stanley seem far more adept at dividing their time between Kiss and their various other business ventures, so fans probably don't need to worry about that old creative tug-of-war starting up again. In the meantime, although Billboard's report doesn't mention a release date for Temple, it does note that production is scheduled to get underway this summer, with a director to be hired "shortly."

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