Fright Night (2010)

At the beginning of this year it was rumored that Sony was looking to do a remake of the 1985 movie, Fright Night, and I was hovering, waiting for the official news. But alas, they couldn’t find a decent enough script and nothing came of it.

That’s all changed now that vampires are in vogue on the silver screen. Everyone is turning everything into a vampire. I’m just waiting for someone to turn Snow White into a vampire and call it an alternate origins movie. (And we thought it was crazy last year?)

Well the Fright Night remake is in the works - DreamWorks that is.

The original Fright Night was written and directed by Tom Holland and was coined a horror comedy. It was about a teenager named Charley Brewster who discovers that his neighbor is a vampire, and no one believes him. You couldn’t blame anyone though, Charley had a very whiney way of conveying his issues.

For the remake, no writer has yet been attached, but the studio says they’re looking to keep the comedy-horror tone while modernizing the effects. That’s intense, considering the effects were not bad for its day. I think that the effects were good then and they would stand up today compared to most small screen efforts.

Michael Gaeta and Alison Rosenzweig of Gaeta/Rosenzweig Films are producing the Fright Night remake along with Michael De Luca.

DreamWorks rarely covers the horror genre and can you blame them? They didn’t have a ton of success with The Uninvited or The Ruins, but they keep eyeballing the monetary success they had with the remake of The Ring and it’s sequel, both of which grossed the studio $390 million worldwide. Everyone is looking for that independent mega-hit.

The co-president of production for DreamWorks, Mark Sourian is overseeing the Fright Night remake.

In this era of remakes, I’m not sure about sticking to the original outline of horror comedy. Sure it had moments, but I never saw it with the twinge of comedy. Are they trying to save face by adding comedy to the label? The movie had it’s drab moments but the active moments of character confrontations from the film scarred me for life (in a good way!) and I have a fondness for a movie that allows me to watch it again, and again.

To be honest, if they took the tone that The Ring brought us and overlay it on the original story we’d have a pretty intense remake that might improve on the original. But then would the remake stand out amongst the hundreds of remakes and vampire movies oozing out of the dark shadows of studios these days? Unless they got lucky, and landed Alex O’Loughlin who not only has vampire experience on his resume, but an incredible range of character delivery skills.

I presume that they would need top notch talent heading the project for O’Loughlin to join. (I can dream, can’t I?) No offense to the creative team in place, but I’m not seeing much in the way of experience as they’ll need to follow in their production partners footsteps, that of Micheal De Luca. De Luca has experience, but if you’ve seen The Love Guru or Ghost Rider, then you see why I’m not holding my breath.

Let’s see if they land a good writer. Maybe we twist it up and get Joss Whedon on this one? (That’s me dreaming again.) In the meantime, who do you think would fit the different parts from the old movie, in today’s list of available acting talent? Megan Fox can play Amy. All Amy does is get hypnotized and walk around in a trance once the movie gets rolling! And we’d love to watch Megan do that!

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