The Wrong Turn series, featuring mutant cannibals hunting unsuspecting travellers in the mountains of West Virginia using an assortment of improvised traps and weaponry, is a franchise that even some hardcore horror fans are surprised to learn is still going. Nevertheless, the seventh installment The Foundation might possibly be getting a release soon.

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All movie releases are currently variable due to, well, everything, and director Mike P. Nelson was recently asked about whether we would see the film any time soon. Here’s what he had to say:

“I honestly have very little news, but I can say we just completely finished the movie this past week and it is wild! The next steps will be in the hands of our distributor.”

So, while there’s no official date for the movie’s release, that it’s a finished product goes a long way to its appearance coming sooner rather than later, and if there’s any time a distributor would consider pushing a DTV title, it’s right now when many people still remain housebound.

The Wrong Turn series began in 2003 and was mostly marketed on the star power of Eliza Dushku, then well known for playing bad girl Faith on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the finale of which aired ten days prior to the film’s release. It was bogged down by a mediocre script and far too much similarity to The Hills Have Eyes, and the subsequent entries went straight to home release, a frequent development for long-running horror franchises.

The second installment, 2007’s Wrong Turn 2: Left for Dead, was the best-received of the bunch, more than a little in part due to Henry Rollins’ portrayal of a former Marine turned host of a survivalist reality show, along with greater creativity and imagination used in designing the makeshift traps used by the murderous clan. From there, the law of diminishing returns reared its ugly head and the series gradually descended ever further into forgettable mediocrity about little more than attractive young women in tight tank tops being menaced.

Wrong Turn: The Foundation is looking to reinvent the franchise with a prequel story, seeing a group of friends encountering a centuries-old hidden community while hiking the Appalachian Trail. What little we’ve been told has no mention of the deformity, cannibalism and inbreeding that characterizes the other movies’ antagonists, so it may well be that the events of this one, scripted by the original entry’s writer Alan B. McElroy, will end up kickstarting the creation of such people.