Her last horror outing, of 10 biblical plagues and The Reaping, wasn't the most loved piece of scary cinema to hit the screens, but the 2-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank is trying again. I'm not sure what has brought about her recent attraction to fantastical horror, but Variety reports that Swank will star in an upcoming adaptation of John Marks' recent novel, Fangland -- a project that she will produce with Das Films and Blumhouse Productions. Mark Wheaton, scribe of The Messengers, handed in the project's first draft just before the strike -- and he's the same guy whose Unfinished Country script just got Samuel L. Jackson to take the lead.

John Marks is a former producer of 60 Minutes, and Fangland merges Bram Stoker's legend of Dracula with his experience on the news show. Yes, that means Hilary is heading back to the vamps, but with a little more drama than her role on Buffy. Evangeline Harker (Swank) is a producer for a television news show who takes an assignment to go into Romania and investigate a criminal legend, Ion Torgu, to get him on camera. This will put Swank face to face with more stories about crazy plagues, first, because one can't get enough of terrible disease. Soon, Torgu accosts her, impersonating Dracula. Like Stoker's tale, Harker finds herself held for months, before she pops up in a Transylvanian monastery as this Torgu Dracula gets introduced to New York City. Since only the first draft has been completed, this production will, most likely, be in the works for a while yet. I wonder... will Swank get accosted by the same, lustful vixen vamps? If you've read it, or would just like to comment on Swank taking on Dracula, please chime in!

Happy Halloween from Cinematical! As a special treat, we've put together this gallery of some of the great movie monsters, from Lon Chaney Sr. as the Phantom in the 1925 silent film The Phantom of the Opera, to Lon Chaney Jr. as The Wolfman. We have an array of Dracula's, from Nosferatu (1922 and 1979 versions) to Dracula (Bela Lugosi, Christoper Lee, Frank Langella, and Gary Oldman -- who do you like best?). We have a slew of evil children and evil adults in the mix as well. Tell us who your favorite movie monsters are, and who we missed including in our gallery.

If you missed catching any of our Spooktacular Halloween Coverage, you can catch up with it all right here! And don't forget to let out your own inner monster by entering our fabulous Halloween Costume Contest.

The image of Lugosi's Dracula is heavily copyrighted; Nosferatu is, by contrast, an open source vampire; you could tell that from his cameo a few years back on Sponge Bob Square Pants. The silent classic was originally a bootleg version of Bram Stoker's novel. When Werner Herzog went to work on a remake of F. W. Murnau's 1922 vampire film, he could call his creature Count Dracula, thanks to public domain laws. Herzog preserved much of the original's style out of admiration for Murnau and "the most important film ever made in Germany" (maybe so...any other suggestions?).

But Herzog's skeptical, neo-documentary approach--seen this summer in Rescue Dawn--wouldn't permit him to use Murnau's mistier plotting. He took pains to see how Nosferatu works. Why has no one burned the evil castle down in daylight? Simple: it doesn't really exist except in ruins, "except in the minds of men" who are tricked by the darkness of night. How does the vampire beat Harker home? There's a line about how the sea voyage is faster than heading back from Transylvania overland. (Unlike the book, this is set about the time Murnau set his version, 1838; there are no railroads yet in Central Europe.)

It must have been something to be a filmmaker in the 1920s, trying to imagine ways to scare people; you had a huge blank slate in front of you. Hardly any of it -- ghosts, vampires, werewolves, mummies, zombies, cat people, maniacs, monsters, homicidal killers -- had been done yet. Moreover, the negative connotations of horror had yet to take hold. Whereas most modern horror films are ashamedly snuck past reviewers, Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) was released to rave reviews. The great critic Carl Sandburg, writing in the Chicago Daily News, called it "the most important and the most original photoplay that has come to this city of Chicago the last year." We can only imagine what Sandburg would have said about F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922); he may have seen it, but he didn't review it. For my money it is the superior of the two films, made by a far greater cinema artist.

Like Wiene, Fritz Lang, Joe May and many German directors of his era, Murnau (1888-1931) worked in German Expressionism, finding ways to manipulate the images in the frame to a point beyond reality for maximum emotional effect. But Murnau was unique in that he used these images to express his personal fears and desires; he also intermingled realistic, nature shots with his bizarre, artificial Expressionist shots. He completed just over 20 films in his short career, and almost half of them are said to be lost. He was gay and constantly struggled with all the conflicting pros and cons of his emotions in his films. He moved to Hollywood in 1927 and made his masterpiece Sunrise there. Just a few years later, after completing his final film, Tabu, he died in a car accident.

The least you can expect from a director, approaching a story as venerable as Dracula, is that he or she will have the guts to take it seriously. Updating the legend to modern day is even more possible when you figure out new versions of old terrors. The 1958 The Return of Dracula, an economical and effective black and white horror film released by UA, stars the ageless Czech-American actor Frances Lederer. Before Lederer's death in 2000, he claimed that his only regret as an actor was appearing in this film, possibly because of its gore content (it was gory by the standards of '58, that is). Apparently, his regret wasn't that Drac was some sort of anti-Eastern European stereotype, seeing as how Lederer reprised the Count as his very last role in "The Devil is Not Mocked," an episode of TV's Night Gallery directed by Legend of Hillbilly John's Manly Wade Wellman. (The plot of that episode is the perfect example of the first story that comes to a novice horror-writer's mind, and which has to be discarded right away: During World War 2, Nazi soldiers commandeer a certain castle, and...)

Well, it scared me, but it must have been the actor, not the story. Lederer is a Dracula to reckon with in The Return of Dracula as he helps himself to the denizens of Carleton, California (population 1162). "His sole purpose is to establish a chain of domination, " says the Van Helsing guy, an "European Police Agency" investigator called Meiermann (Jon Wengraff). This budget Drac was exhibited as The Curse of Dracula, and The Fantastic Disappearing Man--the latter title is an apt description of this one's modest special effects. But I've got an alternate title: I Was a Communist Vampire. Director Paul Landres zeros in on the Red Scare to give this Dracula some teeth.

"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." - Groucho Marx

That famous line is one of Groucho's best, but it is always attributed as being un-sourced. Did he actually say it? Was he in fact mis-quoted? Where did the line come from? I guess it doesn't matter. But if you're planning to dress up as Groucho for Halloween this year, you'll be wanting to memorize some of his lines, because doing an impersonation is necessary for certain costumes, such as that one. Last year I dressed up as Harpo instead of Groucho, because I'm terrible at remembering exact lines, always mis-quoting people and characters; for Harpo all I needed was to close my mouth and honk my horn.

Anyway, there's a new list over at The List Universe laying out the 15 most mis-quoted or mis-remembered lines in cinema, and I thought it would come in handy to any of you dressing up as movie characters this October 31. Going as Dracula? Don't say, "I want to suck your blood." Or as Tarzan? Don't incorrectly utter the words, "Me Tarzan, you Jane." Other famously mis-quoted lines come from Casablanca, Star Wars, Star Trek, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Frankenstein, Apollo 13, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, She Done Him Wrong, Blonde Crazy and White Heat (poor, mis-quoted Cagney!). Sure, a few of them are just barely off the mark, and I think the list is being a bit picky with the Forrest Gump quote, but nonetheless these are lines we think were spoken, yet they never were -- except the Sherlock Holmes one, it seems.

Of course, most of the films come from a time before we could re-watch movies over and over again on VHS or DVD. However, a few were released in the modern, repeat-viewable era. Either way, it is strange how all of these mis-quotes became so commonly attributed and how they exist so prominently within the popular consciousness -- enough that parodies tend to mis-parody the mis-quotes, such as one of my favorite lines from UHF, "Badgers? Badgers? We don't need no stinkin' badgers." I guess maybe it wouldn't be as funny if the movie had correctly imitated The Treasure of the Sierra Madre by instead using the longer, " "Badgers? We ain't got no badgers. We don't need no badgers. I don't have to show you any stinkin' badgers!"

Double Oscar-winner Hilary Swank has reportedly signed to play Evangeline Harker in the big-screen version of John Marks' vampire novel Fangland. The New York Post is reporting that Swank's company optioned the book for Swank to star, which she will, and describes it as a "Dracula meets 'Network' story. That squares with what I've heard about the book -- that it's basically Bram Stoker's Dracula only all the protagonists are news people instead of lords and ladies. Evangeline Harker is a producer for a TV news show called The Hour that's based on 60 Minutes (where Marks used to work) who is debating a marriage proposal and trying to climb the ladder at work when she unexpectedly gets sent to Romania to do a puff piece on a legendary criminal named Ion Torgu. She ends up encountering Togu, who is supposedly very much a Dracula figure. No other details were available in the Post item about the forthcoming production of the film.

Swank has one film already in the can -- the romantic dramedy P.S., I Love You, about a woman who finds messages that her recently deceased husband left her, designed to help her get on with her life. She's also supposedly attached to Labyrinth, a thriller about a woman with multiple personalities, and one of those personalities knows the identity of a killer, but I'll believe this one when I see it actually get off the ground. We also recently reported that Swank is developing a remake of Intimate Strangers, a French film about a woman who thinks she's seeing a psychiatrist, but the guy is actually some nut pretending to be a psychiatrist. Looks like she's got a lot to bite off.

Considering how easy it is to whip together a sequel or remake, and how tantalizingly delicious they seem to be to many filmmakers, you've got to give props to those who decide to make a sequel to an old movie without re-doing the first film. Last year, we spread word of Un-Dead, a sequel to Dracula, the Bela Lugosi classic. Written by Dracula scholar Ian Holt, it is a screenplay that, shockingly, the Bram Stoker kin approve of (they haven't given approval since the 1931 flick). The film picks up 25 years after the end of the first, collecting all the surviving characters together, along with Inspector Cotford, who was cut from the novel before its publication.

Now Blackfilm has a source that brings a lot of names to this intriguing sequel. Ernest Dickerson, one of the directors of the ever-juicy Demon Knight, has reportedly signed on to helm it, and there are a few big names currently negotiating for the film's roles -- Javier Bardem as Dracula, Monica Bellucci as Lucy and in some incredibly cool casting, John Hurt as Professor Van Helsing. They could cast Rob Schneider and Jessica Simpson next, and I'd still watch it to see Hurt in that role. Interestingly, there's no word on who will be playing Jonathan and Mina Harker, although they're said to be part of the film. Of course, the feature will take place in England and Transylvania, as Holt has scouted out both locales, including Dracula's crumbling castle. As this film gears up, is there anyone you want to see in the remaining roles, or casting changes you'd make?

Can you imagine any post-WWII literature being remade and re-imagined as much as the classics of the 19th and early 20th Centuries? Maybe it's just too early. Maybe when I'm an old man, there will be countless adaptations of the Harry Potter books in the way there are presently many versions of Stoker's Dracula, Dickens' A Christmas Carol and Burroughs' Tarzan.

The constant reworking of classics, like Tarzan, likely has something to do with earlier films being too safe or censored. This accounts for remakes being sold as being truer to their source or as being an edgier revisit to something that exists as too innocent and simple in the consciousness of pop culture. The stories of Tarzan have been depicted as everything from childish adventures to mature drama, but Warner Bros. believes there is still another way to tell the tale of the man brought up in the wild.

The studio is looking at John Collee to write a script -- hopefully with Master and Commander in mind more than Happy Feet -- and Guillermo Del Toro to direct. The Pan's Labyrinth filmmaker would possibly be interested in taking on the project following the making of Hellboy 2: The Golden Army. Del Toro doing Tarzan? We know you have an opinion on this one ...

Well, it now looks like the race to bring Dracula back to the big screen is heating up, in both sequel and prequel forms. Back in May, Martha told us about Un Dead, a sequel to Bram Stoker's original story (not Francis Ford Coppola's updated version) set 25 years after the end of Dracula. Apparently, this was also the first script to be approved by Bram Stoker's family since Bela Lugosi's portrayal of the famous vampire back in 1931. Damn, talk about holding out -- you mean to tell me, in 75 years, no one managed to impress this family with a decent Dracula story? What gives?

Anyway, Variety reports Universal has snatched up the spec script, Dracula Year Zero, with intentions to bring an earlier version of Dracula to the big screen. Story is said to revolve around his origins, "weaving vampire mythology with the true history of Prince Vlad the Impaler." The idea here is to portray Dracula as a "flawed hero," all mixed up in love, magic and war. While it's not known whether the Stoker's approved this one, Universal was home to the original 1931 version which means, as adoptive parents, they can do whatever they want.