AdrienneKing Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Oh, what might have been! Alison Lohman gives a terrific performance as the cursed loan officer Christine Brown in Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell, which opens tomorrow. If not for the vagaries of scheduling, though, Ellen Page would have played the lead role. Would Page have been any better? We'll never know, but she joins a long list that inspires thoughts of 'What if ...?'

Once upon a time, we might have seen Leslie Howard as the titular Frankenstein and Bela Lugosi as The Monster. Instead, Colin Clive played the good doctor, Boris Karloff got a jump-start on life, and the rest is horror history. Here are seven more recent examples of actors and actresses who were considered for key roles in great horror films ... and the ones who replaced them, listed in chronological order. [Disclaimer: Based on information provided on IMDb's "trivia" pages, so no guarantees on accuracy.] Better? Worse? You decide.

1. Melanie Griffith / Sissy Spacek (Carrie)

Even though she was in her mid-20s, Spacek looks so young and fragile as Carrie that it's difficult to imagine anyone else in the role. Griffith was 18 or 19 and already had made an impression in Night Moves, The Drowning Pool, and Smile when she auditioned to play the telekinetic high schooler. Conveying Carrie's complexities might have been beyond her still-developing skills at that point. The pic above, left, is from Joyride, released the following year.

When news broke that a new version of Friday the 13th would be issuing forth from the bowels of the Hollywood studio machinery, I was not terribly distressed. Whatever they want to call it -- remake, sequel, or reboot -- the franchise had been soundly broken and thoroughly devalued for many years. I mean, c'mon: Jason on a boat? Jason in space? Freddy vs. Jason? Talk about flogging a dead horse ... So what's the harm in yet another cynical cash and dash enterprise? Like that would be anything new?

And then I took another look at the original and was surprised at how well it holds up.

Maybe it's because I haven't watched Sean S. Cunningham's film all the way through for many years, so many that I can't honestly recall the last time. I have vivid memories of my first viewing, weeks (or maybe months) after it opened, on the front end of a budget double feature at a second-run theater in the San Fernando Valley playing with, of all things, Apocalypse Now. Then as now, I tend to flinch and shield my eyes at explicit gore shots; still, all the kill scenes left deep impressions on my psyche. I would have been happier if they had played the strip monopoly game through to completion; I developed a crush on Adrienne King; and I couldn't get over seeing Bing Crosby's son Harry Crosby in a disreputable horror movie. (Kevin Bacon didn't register as anything more than a pretty boy.) What I saw of the gore shots were scarily gross in 1980 -- as in, how the heck did they do that? And the "reveal" of the killer's identity: wow.