Marti Noxon Talks “Fright Night”

The Buffy The Vampire scribe was one of the writers on I AM NUMBER FOUR, which comes out February 18, but the film horror fans want to hear her chat about is FRIGHT NIGHT. Noxon scripted the remake, which comes out August 19 and stars Anton Yelchin, Colin Farrell, David Tenant and Christopher Mintz-Plasse.

Collider spoke with Noxon, a writer and producer who works in both film and television, and here are a few of the things she had to say about FRIGHT NIGHT.

When Noxon was offered the scripting chores, a pair of jumping off points got her rolling on the redux. “Yeah, there were two things,” she says. “One was that I’d been thinking about Vegas for a setting for a while, for a supernatural story. Because of the mortgage crisis, in some of those suburbs out there, every third or fourth house is vacant and it has this really eerie, ghost town feel. And then, on top of that, I was like, ‘God, if I were a vampire, nobody would know because everybody sleeps during the day and works at night. This would just be an awesome place for monsters!’ So, I had already started rolling that around in my head. It gets really dark, and it’s a place for sin and excess, and people go missing a lot. I was like, ‘I wish I were a vampire. I would so move here!’ When I heard they were thinking about doing the remake, I immediately thought, ‘Well, that would be an awesome movie to set in Las Vegas.’ It has that Spielberg-ian, suburb vibe and that Amblin feeling to it. You’ve got that, superficially, but then underneath that, something is really wrong. That, I immediately went to.

“And then, the second thing was that I went back and looked at the original movie and was like, ‘Why are these guys [Charley and Evil Ed] friends? What happened there?’ They never explain it. It felt like there were just big things cut out. I thought there was stuff that was indicated, but not explored. So, a big part of the movie is the relationship between Charley Brewster [Yelchin] and Evil Ed [Mintz-Plasse]. Thematically, it definitely became a question of, ‘What kind of man do you want to be?’ Charley forsakes his old friendships ’cause he’s momentarily cool. That was a huge touchstone.”

OK, enough with the character-oriented stuff, how scary and gory is the film going to be? “It’s intense,” she replies. ”It has a lot of intense moments, but it’s not very gory. It’s pretty close to the original, but maybe a little bit scarier just ’cause it’s a little more grounded. It’s not quite as over-the-top."

Fangoria