Colin Farrell and Toni Collette Join Fright Night Remake
Posted 05.13.10 by Ryan
Last September, Colin Farrell admitted he wanted to return to Hollywood in a major genre movie, and now he's getting his chance. After some stand-out performances in the independent movies like In Bruges and Crazy Heart, THR reports that Farrell has joined the Dreamworks remake of Fright Night.
Toni Collette is also joining the production, having worked with director Craig Gillespie previously on her Showtime TV show The United States of Tara. Like the 1985 original, the remake will follow a teenager who believes his new neighbor is a blood-sucking member of the undead. Farrell will play the charming—and possibly Irish?—vampire, previously played by Chris Sarandon, while Collette will play the teenager's mom, who disapproves of the new neighbor as well, until she falls under his spell. Anton Yelchin was the first actor to join the production, having been cast in the role of the teenager in April.
Prior to casting, producer Michael De Luca described the remake, in a January interview with Collider, as a counterpoint to the current, pop culture incarnation of a vampire movie.
We thought it would be interesting if, in this atmosphere of the way the vampire is being portrayed right now as a romantic object, under the wire of all that in the culture the real thing moves in next door. And the real thing is a killer. Just a predator. It's the shark from Jaws. On the outside it's a seductive package and it looks like a human being, but it's just about ripping your throat out and drinking your blood. And introducing that kind of vampire into the current environment and also taking advantage of the original's brilliant structure of the boy who cried wolf. This kid, you know, this adolescent boy you're trying to figure out what kind of man he wants to be. Product of a single-parent household-single mom. Being the man of that relationship. Being the man in his new relationship with his current girlfriend. Having an older male vampire move in next door and kind of put the moves on both the mom and girlfriend and what it does to this young man's rite of passage from boyhood into manhood.
I think the original is almost 50/50 or even more laughs than scares. And I think we're going to have appropriate dark humor and sardonic humor and sarcastic humor and erotic humor, but not tongue-in-cheek or cheesy humor but really go for some scares and some depths of character in terms of what these teenagers are going through in their lives before the vampire kind of comes in and starts taking pieces out of everybody's lives.
Screenwriter Marti Noxon (the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show) is writing the script, which is rumored to include Sarandon in the movie playing himself, with Yelchin approaching the actor for help in fighting the vampire. In the original Fright Night, the protagonist sought help from a late-night, horror movie TV host played by Roddy McDowall.
Now word yet on when Fright Night will start production or when it will be released.