What a surprise! Hollywood is considering remaking another '80s horror classic for the naught decade. This time the movie in question is 1985's Fright Night, a low budget film that had a lot of heart to it. Directed by Tom Holland, it was about a teenager named Charley Brewster who discovered that his newly arrived next door neighbor was a real-life vampire. Jerry teamed up with an elder B-movie horror film actor (played wonderfully by Roddy McDowell) and together the two of them stood against Chris Sarandon's surprisingly sinister bloodsucker. The movie had some good scares and nice effects work, it stuck to the vampire mythology, there was comedy sprinkled throughout the story, Sarandon made a great vampire and there was a real sense of danger that Charley and horror show host Peter Vincent could buy the farm. An inferior sequel followed a couple of years later that couldn't capture the same enjoyable atmosphere that the first had.
According to Shock Till You Drop, Screen Gems is dusting off the Fright Night franchise and may even want to shift the locale from a suburban neighborhood to an amusement park setting. This latter piece of intel isn't confirmed by the horror site's sources, just that the studio is developing a new update on the Fright Night concept.
My take on this is that I also believe the Fright Night brand has life still in it but that the producers need to move very carefully when they decide what they want to do with the IP. At its heart Fright Night is about a faded star of horror flicks, a guy like Christopher Lee (before he got big again), Vincent Price or Peter Cushing, who suddenly discovers that monsters are real and a lot more deadly than depicted in the movies he starred in. The young kid is a fan of the older actor and together the two team-up and go off to slay the beasties whose greatest asset is that no one believes in monsters. That's Fright Night and if the relationship between those two characters is strongly defined and established then Screen Gems has a base in which to develop not just this first movie but any follow-ups as well. If you stray away from that premise, and especially if you lose the B-movie actor-turned-late-night-horror-TV-host, the thing will stink.
Anyone else agree?
[Image Credit: © Columbia Pictures]
