Amongst the chaos that was the San Diego Comic Con this year, I got the opportunity to sit down with a few of the cast members of “Fright Night,” including Christopher Mintz-Plasse.
Best known for his role in “Superbad,” It’s fair to say that Mintz-plasse has a promising career ahead of him as he is a talented character actor. He is the no-brainer choice to play Ed, (“Evil Ed” in the original) Charley Brewster’s extremely geeky best friend.
Note: if you haven’t seen the original and are spoiler adverse, I’d skip this posting and the interview as well.
The new version is definitely less campy than the 1985 original, and In an interesting change in direction for the remake Charley and Ed are not best friends, but ex-best friends, and the tension between the two creates some great opportunities for Mintz-Plasse’s wit to shine through. Ed’s sarcasm is no longer a simple nerd character trait, but is driven by pain and rejection.
Check out the interview embedded above, we discuss remakes in general and how the original version of this film definitely had room for modernization, (or improvement.)
There are folks out there who hold the original sacred. I met one of them in an elevator on the way to this interview. She was a girl wearing the dress and the original lamprey-like vampire makeup that Amanda Bearse had worn as the vampire Amy in the first film (basically the face over the house in the original poster)
This girl had apparently had made an impression at the “Fright Night” panel earlier that day. Needless to say she was very skeptical of the new film in that elevator. I hope she’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Fright Night opens this Friday, August 19th.