Fright Night Tagged Articles at Cinematical

As 'secular' holidays go, Halloween is easily my favorite. You can keep your Valentine's Day hearts and your St. Patrick Day benders, and give me a jack o' lantern any day of the week. It's a holiday that I never fail to celebrate with too much candy and as many horror movies as I can get my hands on, and even though I may not trick or treat anymore, I am highly observant when it comes to All Hallows' Eve. Maybe my love for the season is that it really is the perfect holiday for the movie lover, and I always remember gearing up for the big day as a kid by watching scary movies. I still keep that tradition alive as an adult, but like they say; it's all about the kids -- unfortunately for parents, most horror movies aren't.

There is plenty of horror for the grown-ups of the world, and we've got our choice from everything to high concept ghost stories to so-called torture porn, but it's a lot trickier when you start to look for something for something that is a little more family-friendly. So there has to be some middle-ground between G-rated fare like The Great Pumpkin and a Dario Argento splatter fest, right? Well, of course there is, so I thought I'd share five movies that you could show kids without worrying about dooming them to a lifetime on a therapist's couch:

After the jump; my recommendations for kid-friendly scares...

I just want to get this out there right at the start: whoever is responsible for putting the kibosh on plans for a remake of the 1985 horror Fright Night has my eternal thanks. Shock Till You Drop is reporting that Sony's Screen Gems has halted development on the project and word is that the real reason for Sony's decision was that they were unable to come up with a satisfactory script. The film's original director, Todd Holland, had been involved with the project, but in a previous interview with STYD, Holland had confirmed that the script "...apparently has gone through 3 unusable drafts..."

Screen Gems has been in the horror-remake business for a while. Some of their other attempts included remakes of Prom Night, and the English-language remake of REC, better known as Quarantine. Fright Night might be safe for now, but fans of 80's horror still have plenty to worry about; rumor has it that Sony is still remaking the horror flick Hell Night, about a group of college kids getting knocked off in a variety of gruesome ways at an old mansion.

Now hold on to you hats, kids, because it gets worse from here: Sony has already announced that Hell Night would be a PG-13 film. When pressed for a reason as to why Gems was looking to clean up the original flick, Screen Gems president was quoted as saying, "If you are going to make a movie for a bunch of kids, you have to make it PG-13. You try not to make a movie for an audience that is older than your protagonist." Unfortunately, that argument isn't going to change my opinion about 'gore-free' horror any time soon, how about yours?

So is it just me, or is the goodwill of horror fans slowly running out for these kinds of remakes? Sound off below...

Among the perks of being a sought-after Oscar-winning screenwriter is, apparently, the ability to fourwall a movie theater for two weeks and play a bunch of your favorite films for an appreciative audience. That's exactly what Juno's Diablo Cody is doing at LA's New Beverly Cinema from today through July 24th, and it won't come as any surprise to Cody's admirers that the lady's got good taste. Her slate includes reliable classics (Stripes, Pretty in Pink), off the wall genre picks (A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors), some culty fun (Wet Hot American Summer) and the expected shout-out to Juno director Jason Reitman.

Previous guest programmers at the New Beverly have included Edgar Wright, Eli Roth and Joe Dante. Cody will introduce some of the films herself, and the theater's MySpace page promises "many guest appearances."

Kudos to Movie City News for coming across this. Check out the entire schedule after the jump -- it's really an inspired slate of picks. She's got a nose for filmmaking that's smart and unabashedly mainstream, as both Juno and this film festival proves.

Maybe a filmmaker wants to tip their hat to the slashers and psychos who thrilled and chilled them in their youth; perhaps they want to make a post-modern comment on the nature of watching violent entertainment; maybe they just want to scare us good and proper with a moment of sheer blood-curdling terror. Whatever the reason, there are some pretty good horror movies about watching horror movies; here are seven (admittedly skewed towards the modern and the domestic) for your perusal.

1) Scream (1996)

Kevin Williamson's sly, self-referential script exploded every slasher-flick cliché ... and picked some darkly glimmering moments out of the rubble. Starring Neve Campbell as Sidney Prescott, a girl beset by a masked killer, Scream paved the way for a host of imitators, but the original is a surprisingly fresh and remarkably well-structured mystery -- plus, Williamson and director Wes Craven's commentary on the DVD is like a master-class on the history and methodology of slasher film. When the blood-stained climax sees our heroine suggesting our killers have "seen too many movies," the reply comes back fast: "Now Sid, don't you blame the movies. Movies don't create psychos; movies make psychos more creative!" It's a great line -- and you also wonder if it's true. Scream's killer famously asked "Do you like scary movies?" Scream itself asked why you like scary movies, and left you to puzzle over your answer. (Bonus question: How many times did Scream show up on a Cinematical Seven throughout the month of October?)

2) My Little Eye (2002)

Five contestants sign up for a reality-TV-style contest; they spend six months locked together in an isolated home. If you stick it out for the duration, everyone wins a cool million dollars; if one person leaves, though, everyone loses. Much of My Little Eye is shot with distorted web-cams and a you-are-there queasiness -- we're the audience for the "show," and we get to witness as things start to go very, very wrong. Eventually, the truth comes out -- and we feel ourselves becoming a very different kind of viewer, watching something very different than the 'contest' in the film's set-up, seeing the film's events through very different eyes. My Little Eye may not be perfect, but it has one grim, chilling moment that's among the scariest, creepiest scenes I've ever seen in a horror movie.

As the mining of 80's classics continues unabated, it was only a matter of time until someone got around to Fright Night. Shock Till You Drop is reporting that Sony's Screen Gems is currently shopping around for a writer to update the 1985 horror flick. According to Shock's sources, executive producer Scott Strauss "may or may not still be attached," and there has been no word on any of the contenders. Strauss recently produced the Ryan Phillipe thriller Breach back in February, and he was also the producer for Robert 'Freddy Kruger' Englund's indie horror, Killer Pad.

The original Fright Night starred Chris Sarandon (ex-husband to Susan), Roddy McDowall, and William Ragsdale. The story centered on a teen (Ragsdale) who is convinced that his new next door neighbor is a vampire (and this is a horror after all, so you know he's right). With the help of his best friend, girlfriend, and a late-night B-movie show host, they battle the bloodsucker, while, of course, leaving room for a sequel. A sequel did occur; three years later McDowall and Ragsdale returned for Fright Night 2, and while it wasn't a total embarrassment, it never quite managed to live up to the original. But that didn't stop the franchise from creating comic books and novelizations that kept the story going. There is no official word on the remake, but Shock did report that they will "take Fright Night in a different direction. One involving an amusement park in some way" -- so maybe it won't be so much an update, as a 're-imagining' of the story. Somehow, this doesn't exactly put my mind at ease. How about you?