FRIGHT NIGHT - Visual Hollywood

FRIGHT NIGHT (2011)PRODUCTION NOTESAs producer De Luca recalls, "Marti Noxon's agent suggested her as a candidate for screenwriterand we thought, great, but she's already done the vampire thing with 'Buffy,' so she probablywouldn't be interested. Happily, she ended up being very interested. Marti came in and pitchedus basically the story that we're shooting. She had a very fully developed pitch."Noxon understands that in real life there are situations that can quickly evolve from very dark tovery funny. That was the concept for "Fright Night" that she and the director and producers werestriving for. As Executive Producer Gaeta says, "I think that when audiences see the product ofMarti's imagination they'll find a lot of scary dark things, but also beautiful and wonderful thingstoo. She had a really great fix on exactly what the tone of the story should be and the importanceof the relationships among the characters. She gave the script that extra emotional depth thatshe's so good at dramatizing. It was really a lot of fun all the way through her interpretation of'Fright Night.'"The filmmakers knew from the start that they wanted to maintain the basic story and the delicatebalance of comedy and horror of the original film. That was one of the important aspects of theproject that Director Gillespie loved about the screenplay. "There are really horrific momentsthat are very scary, and also very human moments," Gillespie says. "It wasn't just a straight genrefilm. Marti managed to balance thriller, humor and horror."But humor and emotional moments aside, the horror-thriller element in "Fright Night" iscertainly not to be denied. This vampire is not a lovesick, conflicted being—he is an insatiable,unstoppable predator, like the shark in "Jaws." Screenwriter Marti Noxon explains, "At a timewhen vampires are part of the mainstream for moviegoers and TV watchers, some of the shockvalue and mystery surrounding vampire practices is gone. There's a sort of romantic vampirethat's common in the culture right now. We went away from that. We are very true to the spirit ofthe original film," she says.Adds Colin Farrell, "There are none of those romantic leanings. This vampire is just a killer. He'sover four hundred years old. He's probably a little bit bored when we find him, but he feeds. Hejust feeds. He exists."THE CAST: VAMPIRES, VICTIMS AND VALIANT HEROESWith his success directing the feature film "Lars and the Real Girl," as well as the Showtime ®original series "United States of Tara," there was no doubt that Craig Gillespie would bring hisfilmmaking integrity to "Fright Night." Upon reading Marti Noxon's screenplay, Gillespie foundthat he could not stop thinking about it and was eager to immerse himself in the project. "I wasn'tnecessarily looking to do a vampire movie at the time," he says of the unexpected opportunity,©2011 DreamWorks Pictures 4