Nothing in Hollywood, least of all a vampire, stays buried forever.
Case in point: Fright Night, the 1985 horror-comedy hybrid about a high school misfit who discovers his charismatic neighbour is one of the blood-guzzling undead.
Dug up and brushed off, the remake opens Friday, starring Colin Farrell as the Dracula-wannabe next door and Anton Yelchin as the teenage suburbanite who becomes an improbable slayer.
Yet while the prevailing assumption is any remake is crassly motivated, screenwriter Marti Noxon -- who actually penned episodes of TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer -- points out that while the original has a cult following, it wasn't so popular that the redo is an automatic slam-dunk.
"It was more than 25 years ago, so I don't think anyone thought we were in it for the money. We thought there was a cool idea there."
To that end, while the new version does retain the bones of its predecessor, it has also been significantly updated as well.
For one, the television horror-show host (Roddy McDowall) who aided in the supernatural battle has been morphed into a Criss Angel-style Vegas magician (David Tennant). For another, both female leads -- the out-of-his-league girlfriend played by Imogen Poots and single mom portrayed by Toni Collette -- have been upgraded. And this Charlie (Anton Yelchin) starts out as much more of a "douchebag" who has turned his back on his best friend (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) in order to fit in with the popular crowd.
"He's still a nerd, but here he's trying to hide it in this vain attempt to impress this girl," Yelchin says.
"But what she really likes about him is, from what I gathered, she (somehow has the ability), as women sometimes do, to see beyond what he's trying and appreciate him for who he is."
As an actor, the 22-year-old Lenigrad-born star has successfully managed to straddle the line between big-budget productions (Star Trek, Terminator: Salvation) and Sundance-scale independent fare (Alpha Dog, the upcoming Like Crazy).
"It doesn't matter whether it's a mainstream film or a super-weird indie," he says.
"You can still find things. That's the beauty of being an actor. No matter how down you get -- 'Oh man, this is so generic feeling' -- you can always try to bring something. There's always something hidden there. You just have to pick at it enough ... (Director Craig Gillespie) really embraced us doing whatever we wanted. It's a studio film so you worry, 'Oh man, they're going stick to every single note.' But not really. We had a lot of freedom."
Within reason, however. Meaning that he's still essentially playing the straight man opposite scene-devourers Tennant and Farrell.
"If you try to overcompensate and match them, you ruin what they're doing in a way," Yelchin says.
"So a lot of it was giving them the freedom in those moments and treat those moments as seriously as possible. But you can still have fun. When we did all the high school stuff, that still felt light."
Farrell, he adds, "created such a great character.
"You just want to eat him up. Everything he does, every little moment, you're so involved in what he's doing.
"For me, it was just making sure Charlie was scared s---less. Then you would buy whatever Colin was doing."
Mintz-Plasse gets evil
He's gone from Superbad to just being, well, super bad.
"I get to be evil and dark, which is fun because I'm not an evil guy," says Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who became a star after playing McLovin' in 2007's Superbad. "It's kind of fun to get to do something you're not in real life."
This time out, he's discussing his role as "Evil Ed" in the remake of Fright Night, in which he morphs from dweeb to demon. But the same could have been said of his supervillain character in last year's Kick-Ass.
"Both those scripts came to me and I loved them," he says.
In Fright Night, he's the dweeby best pal of Anton Yelchin's Charlie, who ends up being enslaved to Colin Farrell's vampire.
"He was iconic in the original, I didn't want to act like I was imitating him or ripping him off in any way," Mintz-Plasse says of his predecessor, actor Stephen Geoffreys.
"The way (screenwriter Marti Noxon) wrote it, my character was way more depressed and sad in this one, so that helped as well. In the 1980s Fright Night, Ed was zany and wacky and kind of crazy and I just don't think that would play as well now. (This is) more toned down."
kevin.williamson@sunmedia.ca
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