The mighty combo of producer Jason Reitman, director Karyn Kusama, writer Diablo Cody and Transformers hotty Megan Fox (whether or not she can act) should add up to a very commercial Jennifer's Body. This angry-at-men demonic horror flick reminds me for some reason of Attack of the 50-Foot Woman. This is one of several pics (also including The Rocker and the upcoming I Love You, Beth Cooper) developed by Fox Searchlight's one-time sibling Fox Atomic to be released, not by Searchlight, but by Big Fox, which is sticking a trailer --not the red band trailer below-- in front of Bruno this Friday.

UPDATE: Here's the Shock till You Drop note from Kusama, Cody and Reitman (hat tip: The Playlist, which has soundtrack info):

Fox is putting a trailer of 'Jennifer's Body' in front of 'Bruno' this Friday. Great, right? Only problem is it's not our trailer. It's kind of a straight horror preview and while we're sure it'll appeal to many of you, we wanted to make sure you guys got to see our cut... Lets call it the "filmmaker's cut". We think it captures the comedy and scares of the horror films we grew up on - a kind of nostalgia for when horror films were fun. Can't wait to show you the whole film... In the meantime, here's the red band trailer we wanted our fans to see." - Karyn, Diablo, and Jason

In the push for traffic, AOL-owned Cinematical just launched two new genre specific sites, reports Erik Davis: SciFi Squad and Horror Squad. Davis says he and Scott Weinberg "will be running both, and will be the main contacts on both."

Every once in a while I am reminded that my taste is not the same as the mass audience. I can usually call a blockbuster like 300 or Star Trek--in other words, I ignore the tracking and opening weekend predictions to insist--THIS MOVIE IS SO GOOD IT WILL DO BUSINESS. Sometimes, thank God, word-of-mouth counts for something, so that a movie becomes A MUST-SEE.

But occasionally I really like something--often beloved by critics as well--that just doesn't catch moviegoers' fancy. Take, say, the two-part Tarantino/Rodriguez Grindhouse. Both movies were simply too arcane, too close to their pulpy cinephile roots. But what was arcane about Drag Me to Hell, which earned a whopping 83 on Metacritic? But opened to $16 million? And is getting creamed by the competition? What makes this Sam Raimi movie a tweener? Well, the fact that it's a horror/comedy hybrid, for one. (See Slither.) It looks like you can't have a fun scary gross-out E-ride rated PG-13: that way you lose both the family and the horror crowd. (And there's a Fright Night remake in the works.)

That's Dennis Cozzalio's theory (scroll down). He hosted a fun gathering at the Mission Tiki drive-in last Saturday night, complete with hearse and Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule T-shirt giveaways. Was this film freak gathering a bad sign for the movie? Well, most of the drive-in's business that night was over on the side showing Pixar's Up. Other folks have criticized Universal's marketing, which failed to distinguish Drag Me to Hell enough. Debuting it at SXSW was the right move, but the message that the movie was really fun somehow didn't come across.

It's easier to recognize a smart-house tweener that isn't going to do any business. Focus Features' Away We Go, which has all the indie cred bonafides in the world, from Dave Eggers and Sam Mendes to TV comedy stars John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph and movie actress Maggie Gyllenhaal, just doesn't cut it. Mainly the two rom-com leads are not interesting enough, forming a warm mushy bowl of boredom in the middle of the film. We know they love each other. So?

Secondly, the film is a road movie, always a risky narrative structure (see: My Blueberry Nights, also with a non-pro, Norah Jones, at its center). Third, beware of smart sophisticated filmmakers who are making fun of US for being one or more of the following: idiotic, alcoholic, leftie, bourgeois, self-involved, or lousy parents. The movie might as well be called BOOBS ARE US. One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons shows one couple saying to some pals, "Did you see Honky Tonk Freeway? It ruined our August." That ill-fated 1981 John Schlesinger comedy also looked down on ordinary American folks who weren't as cool as the filmmakers. IFC's David Hudson rounds up Away We Go's bad reviews; 56 on Metacritic isn't going to get this pic very far.

This Saturday night, David, Nora and I are going to see Sam Raimi's latest--and in my view, greatest movie--Drag Me to Hell, at the Mission Tiki Drive-In, Montclair, California (UPDATE: Check out Dennis Cozzalio's ode to drive-ins). I am not alone--so far the movie is earning an 85 on Metacritic. We'll spread out a picnic on the grass tarmac, blast a boombox and car stereo, and settle in for a guaranteed good time. I saw the movie at SXSW (here's my first story; my flip cam interview is below). Raimi's expert skill is knowing how to gross you out and take you on a thrilling E-ride--without making you too frightened to enjoy yourself. It's all in the tone, so that that the audience is screaming with delight, not horror. He also took his time in the editing room. Watch closely and you will see that this movie's look, sound and editing are carefully calibrated for maximum effect. Here's Joe Morgenstern's rave in the WSJ. His opening lines: "O, joy, a horror flick that’s smart and funny, as well as cringeworthy for all the right reasons. And up to speed on the mortgage crisis, too."

Here's the LAT interview. And my chat with Raimi:

Here's the trailer:

L.A.'s v. cool comics store Meltdown on Sunset is hosting an after midnight book signing with director Guillermo del Toro on Tuesday, June 2. He's flying in from the New Zealand set of The Hobbit to sign 500 exclusive copies of the first book, written with Chuck Hogan, of The Strain Trilogy, which is about a virus-infected plague of monsters invading New York City. (You can preorder Book One). Here's my earlier story.

UPDATE: Wired talks to del Toro and posts a trailer:

UPDATE: Del Toro talks to Craig Ferguson:

While Guillermo del Toro is busy in New Zealand shooting The Hobbit, he keeps lining up future projects like The Strain Trilogy, co-written with Chuck Hogan (The Standoff). William Morrow will publish Book One on June 2. Del Toro won't be featuring any "romantic, languid young men sucking on necks of beautiful people" in his these vampire procedurals, he says in this video interview. Unlike Twilight or True Blood, this virus-infected plague of monsters invading New York City will be inhuman, menacing, disgusting, alien and full of dread, he promises.

A new series of movies won't be far behind.

Universal debuted Sam Raimi's fantastic horror-fest Drag Me to Hell on Sunday night at a packed midnight show at the Paramount Theatre; I caught up with the director earlier in the day. "I feel the need to deliver no matter what the budget," confessed Raimi, who showed up in scruffy Austin wearing a suit and tie. "The audience has to laugh or it's a failure, jump or it's a failure, cheer or it's a failure. It's like a circus act, as opposed to showing fine art. It's the high art of entertaining an audience."

The director, who wrote Drag Me to Hell with his brother Ivan, has nothing to worry about. The audience was roaring with pleasurable disgust as various incarnations of a wicked-witch gyspy crone with evil eyes disgorged all sorts of mean nasty ugly things all over sweet ambitious loan agent Alison Lohman. While the movie is silly and over the top, the audience is in on the joke. (An invitation to a cabin the in the woods yields knowing groans.) It's great fun. It will make a mint.

A student of classic horror, Raimi pays homage to Robert Wise's The Haunting, not to mention Roman Polanski's Repulsion, as houses bulge and rumble, wind ominously ruffles leaves, and freaked out young Lohman (constantly left alone when she is in dire need of psychiatric care) whips out a butcher knife to sacrifice her "little kitty" in order to stave off a nasty bitch of a curse. I was slightly puzzled as to why Justin Long wasted his time playing Lohman's remarkably dull boyfriend; the answer eventually became clear.

What Raimi did, while he fussed over this movie in the editing room, was play with the sound. The music and sound effects manipulate us expertly; time and again the audience screeched with delight as bodies rose up from the road--accompanied by swells of wrenching violins--or popped up in the back seat.

"Sound is 50% of a movie," Raimi says. "The audience is not aware of how much they're affected by sound. A rough cut is so much worse than a finished film, after fine-tuning the editing and sound effects: dimensionality, continuation of characters, how dialogue is communicated through space. You step into a big close-up, start in the center speaker quietly with some echo in it, move left and right with a little sound, you're then filling the theater with a statement as the music swells. You have a moment!"

Raimi isn't done tinkering; he was mixing until late Saturday night and he's back on a plane at 7 AM Monday morning to return to the editing room, he says: "I'm hoping I'm in good shape for that mix."

Find more videos like this on AnneCam

Diablo Cody is not only the mother of Juno and the many faces of Tara but she has also spawned Jennifer's Body, starring hottie Megan Fox as a possessed mean-girl cheerleader gone very wrong. Think Carrie meets the Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. Karyn Kusama directs, Jason Reitman produces. (EW has a preview in their current issue which I can't find online.) It's due in the fall. UPDATE: And Cody is producing a script with Mason Novick called Breathers: A Zombie's Lament, written by ex-reader Geoff LaTulippe.

Never to waste a moment licking his Oscar wounds, Clint Eastwood talks to The Guardian about Gran Torino and his upcoming Mandela, based on the book by John Carlin. Morgan Freeman will star in the title role.

Trekmovie.com tours the new USS Enterprise. I know the J.J. Abrams movie looks commercial. It may charge up another next generation of fans. But this ship doesn't ring "Trek" to me. Isn't that important here?

An Education's Carey Mulligan is the toast not only of Sundance, but Berlin.

Variety owner Reed Elsevier negotiates to extend its loans.

In a sign of the journalistic times, the best recent stories in the LAT seem to come from the Washington Post, like this one about the worst films of 2008. The biggest loser, One Missed Call, was green-lit by Warner Bros., a Japanese horror remake starring low-rent thesps Edward Burns and Shannyn Sossamon. It earned a zero Rotten Tomatoes ranking, quite an accomplishment.

There is a silver lining for 2009, as Hollywood faces grim times. If the studios, God forbid, are forced by the credit crunch to make fewer, less expensive films and spend their own money producing them (as the LAT suggests in this grim forecast written before the SAG strike looked less likely), yes, they will take less risks, but they will also pay more attention to making strong commercial films with a defined market niche. In short, they will make better films. And fewer ones like One Missed Call.

In the wake of California voters passing the gay marriage ban known as Proposition 8, gay activists are targeting Mormons and the State of Utah. A.P. reported the news of a movement toward a Utah boycott this weekend. This could include Hollywood folks not attending the Sundance Film Festival. (It is far too late to move the fest to another location like Lake Tahoe.)

David Poland weighs in, and Indiewire grabs a Sundance reaction. And Dana Harris wraps up the story at Wilshire and Washington.

The Sundance Fest gave a statement Monday:

"Sundance Institute was founded on the idea of championing diversity and freedom of expression. It would be a grave disappointment to us if our Festival were to be singled out for a boycott, especially as we celebrate 25 years of showcasing independent voices."

True confession. I am into vampires.

Raised on Hammer Dracula films starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, when I was nine I dressed up as a Chinese vampire on Halloween. F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu is a fave. I devoured Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, as well as the classic movie starring Bela Lugosi. ("I don't drink...wine.") I read all of Anne Rice's Lestat novels. Interview with a Vampire the movie was pretty good; so was Francis Coppola's Dracula. I even went to see Underworld, though not the sequel, and suffered manfully through Van Helsing. (A third Underworld, Rise of the Lycans, pitting vampire leader Bill Nighy vs. werewolf Michael Sheen, is due in January.)

I rushed through the first two Stephenie Meyer young adult Twilight vampire romances, and witnessed the femme takeover of Comic-Con at the Twilight conference in Hall H, when thousands screamed en masse for Rob Pattinson. Here's my pre-Comic-Con interview with Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke (the full interview is on the jump). The movie junket is coming up. A cadre of women in my office are begging to screen the movie ASAP. This is not normal.

Even though Twilight doesn’t open until November 21, moviegoers are already buying advance tickets for the film via Fandangotwilighttickets.com. According to the results of a Fandango survey of 5000 moviegoers interested in Twilight:

92% of respondents say they’ll see Twilight on opening weekend; 85% say they plan to see the film more than once; 56% are planning to see the movie with a group of friends; 97% have read the novel by Stephenie Meyer; 86% would be interested in visiting the locations where the movie was filmed; 95% of the respondents to the survey are female; 42% of respondents are 25 or older; 58% are younger than 25.

HBO's True Blood also plays around with similar romantic ideas, but does so with a more mature, sexy edge. I can't get enough of this bloody stuff. What's the appeal? Brian Lowry sinks his teeth into the vampire trend. The WSJ parses the movie power of the vampire. Here's the Twilight trailer:

This trailer for Let the Right One In, a well-reviewed Scandinavian vampire romance that is currently in theaters, also creeps me out:

This weekend's High School Musical 3 (63% Tomatometer) scored even bigger than expected with teen girls, and Saw 5, which was not screened, played to the guys. (True confession: I have never seen a Saw movie. Not my idea of a good time.)

For grown-ups, Changeling delivered a strong per screen average on its opening weekend, while Gina Prince-Blythewood's The Secret Life of Bees pulled ahead of Oliver Stone's W. on their second weekend. Here's Variety's weekend b.o. wrap:

“W.” dropped 49% to $5.3. Cume for the George Bush pic is $18.8 million, with a gross in the $25 million range likely after a post-Election Day exit.

This is a classic case of too much competition on the second weekend after a strong opening supported by a big ad spend and Oliver Stone's ubiquitous media presence. After I had just seen him on Charlie Rose, CNN's Larry King Live and Shootout and heard him on NPR, I did a phoner with him at NY's Four Seasons Hotel. Stone had just spotted one of the characters in his movie, ex-CIA chief George Tenet, in the restaurant. "Did you go over to him?" I asked. "Oh, no," Stone said.

Did he feel that he had to open the $30 million movie before the election? Was the timing right for this? He could have pushed it back if he wanted to, Stone says: "Let's be clear about this. I had the right to hold. It was a good faith effort to try and make the October 17 date. I had final cut, I could have delivered in December for a January release." But he was into the rhythm of finishing it in time, opening it this fall before the election.

Stone knows the downside of being rushed into opening a picture too soon--Alexander was not finished when it opened; the sober re-edited DVD version is far superior. Stone left thousands of feet of film on the edit-room floor on Alexander. By contrast, W. was shot fast on a tight budget; there was no waste. He shot on 26 locations in 46 days and edited in seven weeks. "There were no reshoots," he says. "We rehearsed with a great repertory company, nobody was making mistakes. We got what we needed." Only a few deleted fantasy scenes will make it to the DVD.

It's hard to calibrate timing with a topical movie like this, Stone admits. He had no idea George W. Bush would be so down and out when the movie opened. He had thought the White House might come after them, fighting, but "Bush is defeated," he says. "He is weakened now. We could not have foreseen that then. He's hated now. Will people be interested?"

Would waiting until after the inauguration have been better, as "he's leaving office, and we're exorcising the ghost?" he asks. Stone would have taken that course "if it had not fallen in, if we needed reshoots." Finally, the momentum was moving fast toward an October opening and he was ready to open the movie on schedule.

The Secret Life of Bees did better than W. on its second weekend on fewer screens (1630) with a higher $5.9 million weekend gross and a total of $19.2 to date. Searchlight worked hard to achieve these results, chasing not only fans of the bestseller--which is hugely popular--but literate women in general, and African-American audiences. They're building buzz on an $11 million movie.

"We were judicious in our spend," says Fox Searchlight COO Nancy Utley. "We were scared to death of reviews." That's because older women tend to take reviews more seriously, and sure enough, they were mixed (58% on Rotten Tomatoes). But some key critics were fans, including Roger Ebert, USA Today and People. And Oprah Winfrey devoted a show to the film.

Utley comforted herself with the fact that some movies hit without reviews, like Ya-Ya Sisterhood. On the other hand, Denzel Washington's Antoine Fisher had not scored with African American audiences, but it was less of a known title. Bees was a "faithful straight-on adaptation" of an "extraordinary book," Utley says.

And Bees had no ordinary ensemble either--Queen Latifah, Alicia Keyes, Jennifer Hudson, Dakota Fanning, Sophie Okonedo. Searchlight targeted book clubs and the morning talk shows, bought TV spots on BET and Desperate Housewives, and took advantage of some faith-based endeavors. The distrib booked the movie in areas where not only African-American pics had scored but literary films like Atonement.

Definite recommends in the exit polls were A or A+ across every demo. Searchlight's own poll was 90%. Among African Americans, it was 91% and non-African Americans, 86%. "It's a color-blind movie," says Utley. 'We're hopeful."

[Photo of Oliver Stone by Jeffrey Wells]

Set for release on Friday February 13th is producer Michael Bay's remake of Friday the 13th, from the director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre--no, not Tobe Hooper, a logical mistake, but the remake, Marcus Nispel. A stylish trailer, though, set back at Camp Crystal Lake, on Jason's birthday...

The new Twilight trailer hits hard as an action thriller---the Romeo + Juliet vampire/human romance between Rob Pattinson and Kristin Stewart is still front and center, but this one also targets the male action demo. Summit wants the whole pie on this one. They spent extra bucks for reshoots. And they want to score when the pic opens November 21.

Twilight

The New Yorker is taking nominations for the scariest movie ever made.

Their quite reasonable list includes:

1. Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Tobe Hooper (1974) (I'd say goriest, not scariest)

2. The Silence of the Lambs, Jonathan Demme (1991) (creepy, not terrifying)

3. The Body Snatcher, Robert Wise (1945) (I'd give the edge to Wise's The Haunting, below)

4. Night of the Hunter, Charles Laughton (1955) (Excellent movie, but scariest? It's psychologically scary, in the sense that kids want to trust grown-ups, and in this case that's a very bad idea.)

5. Mulholland Drive, David Lynch (2001) (Hmmm. I'd say Blue Velvet was scarier.)

My adds to their list:

Japanese zombie flick Oni Baba (1964).

Robert Wise's The Haunting, the most terrifying haunted house movie ever.

John Carpenter's 1978 Halloween. The prototype for a lot of imitators to follow.

George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1978). "They're coming to get you, Barbara..."

Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Just because it's predictable doesn't mean it doesn't deserve inclusion on this list. It still works. Here's the shower scene:

Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1964) puts a young and dewy Catherine Deneuve through the ringer.

If you're thirsting for more horror movie lists, Cinematical has seven horror remakes that don't suck.

Robert Englund himself is floating Billy Bob Thornton as a possible replacement for Freddie Krueger in the new Platinum Dunes Nightmare on Elm Street remake, reports JoBlo.

Check out their photo treatment. I like it!

The Film Experience has collected the top ten Queens of Screams. They miss the chance to include a mother-daughter act: the omitted Janet Leigh (Psycho) as well as the included Halloween's Jamie Lee Curtis.

[Photo montage courtesy of Film Experience]

{Posted by David S. Cohen}

Get an early peek here. And yes, they're giving us a good look at the eponymous werewolf. A couple of good looks, in fact.

{Posted by David S. Cohen}

ShockTillYouDrop.com has a conversation from Comic Con with I Am Legend director Francis Lawrence about the possibility of an I Am Legend prequel, with Will Smith to return as hero Robert Neville. This film would be about the collapse of global civilization after the "Krippin Virus" gets loose. (Hat tip: GetTheBigPicture.net)

""Yes, yes, absolutely, we're actually trying to crack that," says Lawrence. "We're trying to figure out some ideas for it, but yes, it would be a prequel." I guess. But nobody ever really cracked the first one, and that didn't seem to matter at the box office. I Am Legend is riveting until something actually has to happen. Will Smith alone in New York and the flasbacks of the beginning of the epidemic are terrific. But the moment Alice Braga and her kid show up, and the actual plot starts, it falls apart.

Since those flashbacks were so compelling, maybe a prequel is the best idea anyway.

Judging from Comic-Con, vampires and werewolves of all shapes and sizes are on the rise.

Besides the romantic vampire phenom Twilight and the sexy HBO-targeted True Blood, a host of other vampire movies were on display at the Con.

Greek production designer and creature maven Patrick Tatopoulos has taken over the Underworld franchise, heading into prequel territory to provide equal time for the werewolves in Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, starring a well-buffed, long-maned Michael Sheen (The Queen) as a werewolf in love with a sword-wielding, horse-riding, warrior vampire, Rhona Mitra (Doomsday), the daughter of vampire overlord Bill Nighy. "The last two stories were through the eyes of the vampires, in the air," said Tatopoulos. "This is about earth, a love story and quest for freedom."

"I'm a vampire, I'm a zombie and a squid," said Nighy. "How many people do you know can make that claim?"

Some of the fans actually booed a trailer showing Noah Wyle as a gentle librarian who falls for a sexy vampire in Jonathan Frake's The Librarian: The Curse of the Judas Chalice, basically a Something Wildish romantic comedy for TNT. The sequel Lost Boys: The Tribe looked pretty warmed over, too. “You’ll never grow old, you’ll never die and you’ll never know fear again,” one vampire tells a new recruit. Also not something I will ever see is Quarantine, a 2009 Screen Gems horror flick that traps a bunch of terrified people inside a tenement which has been infected by rabid vampire/werewolf attackers. It's done Cloverfield-style, and we're looking at the videotape. Or not.

X-Men's Wolverine is a kind of mutant superhero werewolf, right?

Hugh Jackman brought down the house when he popped into the Con, surprising the denizens of Hall H with a remarkable amount of energy for someone who had been on a plane from Australia, having just wrapped the X-Men spin-off, Origins Wolverine. It's his first visit with an X-Men movie, he said. Impulsively, Jackman jumped into the audience and greeted Wolverine comics creator Len Wein. "I have to shake your hand, buddy," he said. Without your pen I wouldn't have a career."

The movie is due May 1, 2009, based on a script by David Benioff. "The movie is big, it's action packed," Jackman said. "If I can describe the Wolverine movie in two words: It's badass." He added, "You're going to see a lot of berserker rage."

Fox co-chairman Tom Rothman and Jim Gianapulos were in the house as they screened some footage of Jackman and Liev Schreiber pitted against one another in training as they learn to control their powers. Gambit (Friday Night Light's Taylor Kitsch) was also unveiled. After the panel, Jackman flew off across the Pacific again, this time to Japan, for a vacation.

Yes, having Rick Baker (American Werewolf in London) do prosthetic make-up for The Wolfman is a good thing. CG will be used for the transitions, Baker admitted at the Hall H panel: “Something magical happens when you get an actor in good makeup, when he sees himself in the mirror, and says, ‘I’m the Wolfman.' This is an old-school gothic horror movie.”

“Everybody talks about how boring the makeup process is,” said Benicio del Toro, whose manager Rick Yorn sold Universal on this period remake of the Lon Chaney, Jr. classic, a fave of his client. “I loved watching him build the makeup for four hours. It’s about becoming. It’s exciting. The tough part is taking it off. That gets desperate.”

Even if del Toro is a genuine fan who argued for staying true to the original, the actor (as directed by last-minute helmer Joe Johnston) looks uncomfortable in 19th century tweeds as the estranged American son of Brit noble Anthony Hopkins and pursuer of corseted beauty Emily Blunt.

“I was running and screaming,” Blunt said. “I liked the whole idea of being a damsel in distress.”

“And I was chasing her,” said del Toro.

[Photo Jackman and Len Wein courtesy LA Times]

Click here for more photos from Comic-con

Comic-Con is coming at the end of the month, and two movies sure to make a splash at the San Diego convention center are Frank Miller's neo-noir The Spirit and Catherine Hardwicke's vampire romance Twilight. I interviewed both directors for my column: Miller says The Spirit is in color, not black and white, and that he colors with emotion. Hardwicke talks about auditioning Robert Pattinson to play the vampire Edward Cullen opposite Kristen Stewart's Bella--- on the bed of her Venice beach pad. Only with those two was there serious heat.

And here's the Comic-Con sked. UPDATE: And here's EW's cover story and backlash to their ultra-glam cover shoot, which alters the appearance of the actors from the movie.

Summit Entertainment is doing cartwheels. That's because they're already in production on a movie, Twilight, based on the first book in a trilogy vampire saga by book phenom Stephenie Meyer.

The 34-year-old Mormon author just landed a takeout in Time Magazine calling her the new queen of fantasy with the head: The Next J.K. Rowling? The article praises Meyer's books for being about the "erotics of abstinence." She "rewrites stock horror plots as love stories."

She's basically the young adult Anne Rice, because Twilight is a romantic 17-year-old Romeo and Juliet with vampires and humans. Rising star Kristen Stewart (discovered by Jon Favreau in Zathura, Panic Room) plays a girl who falls for a handsome guy (Robert Pattinson, of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) who turns out to be a vampire. But he's a good vampire who has renounced sucking human blood. He and his mother coven feed on animals. His virtue--his psychological struggle against his lust for blood--makes him interesting. The movie, directed by thirteen's Catherine Hardwicke, is due December 12.

Vampires have fed Hollywood since its infancy, from Bram Stoker's Dracula and Nosferatu to Rice's Interview with a Vampire, Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Underworld series. But this series has femme appeal.

When Summit slapped a teaser trailer up on MySpace on Monday at 11 AM, it pulled 1 million views in 36 hours and has now passed 2 million. The teaser will premiere on E.T. Friday, and will run in front of family-friendly Speed Racer (maybe that will boost its ticket sales). "I would have been happy with 500,000," says Summit chief Rob Friedman, who scooped up the rights to Twilight when it had sold 10,000 copies just after he started Summit's new production/distrib arm. Paramount had the option and let it go. Since then the first three Twilight books have sold over 6 million copies in the U.S. "I knew the book had a fan base but it's always good to see it's bigger than you think," says Friedman, who has a potential franchise on his hands. This is what any new company lusts after.

UPDATE: Wired is also tracking this. The trailer could break the current record of 4.1 million views in one week set in March by Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The internet fan buzz on this is so intense that Summit marketing may want to consider pulling back a tad.

Here's the HD teaser trailer:

Twilight in HD

[Illustration for Time by Anita Kunz]

(Posted by Peter Debruge)

Few filmmakers can connect with their inner child the way Guillermo del Toro does, although that quality looks like it just might undermine how much we grown-ups have to look forward to in Hellboy II: The Golden Army.

After an elegant teaser that laid out many of these same images in a semi-logical fashion that adults could appreciate comes this "show everything" cocktail designed (it would seem) to appeal to the kiddies. It's fitting that del Toro is making this series for Universal since he clearly has the studio's classic monster movies in mind — then again, Uni's recent Mummy retreads sacrificed the creaky, B-movie appeal of the original series for noisy CG-heavy effects, and del Toro's first Hellboy picture wasn't much different.

This franchise, of course, is del Toro's big passion project, and he's admitted that he didn't have the budget he wanted last time. But surely script comes first, and it's tough to judge by this trailer — which puts the visuals front and center — how strong the story will be. Still, amid the frenzy, it's possible to decipher that all manner of monsters (how 'bout those visionary "forces beyond our understanding"?) emerge to do battle with the humans, and that Hellboy and his gang will have to choose sides. Sounds a lot like the "mutants vs. humans" dilemma of the X-Men series. Can we trust del Toro to get it right?

EW has exclusive pics of Benicio Del Toro as Wolfman. Who would we rather see exploring his out-of-control id, Edward Norton as The Hulk, or Benicio del Toro as The Wolfman? Hmmm.

Who's your fave Wolf Man? Michael J. Fox? Michael Landon? Or Lon Chaney (pictured)?

Empire Magazine posts some exclusive photos of Edward Norton and Bill Hurt in Marvel's new and presumably improved The Incredible Hulk, which Norton rewrote. The movie opens June 13.

[Hat Tip: Premiere.com]

Wired.com has three movie stories up:

The Oscar-nominated Iraq films.

An interview with Phil Donahue on his doc Body of War.

And a piece on The Signal, a horror movie about the dangers of too much information.

From January 30 through February 29th, MySpace Film members who submit their horror shorts via the Diary of the Dead MySpace profile can try to win a spot on George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead DVD. Visitors to the Diary of the Dead MySpace profile can vote for their favorite short films; the top ten will be judged by Romero, who will pick the five best for inclusion on the DVD. (The film, which was reviewed out of Toronto, hits theaters on February 15.)

Here's the Diary of the Dead trailer.

Cloverfield ate up the weekend boxoffice, reports Pam McClintock.

Todd McCarthy likes it.

Cloverfield is fun. It's a hand-held, cleverly manipulated monster movie told from the point-of-view of a bunch of Manhattan 20-somethings trying not to get killed. Some of them die. They pass the camera back and forth. Cloverfield is a fitfully scary, amusing, annoying rollercoaster thrill-ride that lasts 74 minutes. It cost only $25-million--so who cares how big the opening is this weekend? I will bet money that the pic does well with moviegoers in the end. God forbid it should build word-of-mouth. Doesn't anyone believe in that anymore? It works like a charm.

J.J. Abrams talks about his mystery box.

UPDATE: Jeff Wells has the tracking numbers, which are ticking up.

But critics may be harsh, judging from one friend of mine who wrote me this response: "i thought my eyes were bleeding when i left. i thought my head was going to explode." My sense was that it played for the fan boys at the screening on the Paramount lot last night. Variety critic Justin Chang and I ran into a headless Statue of Liberty on our way out, swathed in moonlight.

And the LAT's Mark Olsen writes up the making of the movie.

Teeth opens this Friday, and as the tagline says: "Every rose has its thorns."
Check out the first five minutes:

If moviegoers respond to Cloverfield the way Harry Knowles has on AICN--and I was damned impressed with the footage I saw--then when this movie opens on January 18 it will be, forgive the expression, a boxoffice monster. Paramount, which has been holding back the movie to preserve the mystery--they don't want that freaking monster to hit the net-- can start screening it now! (And yet again a studio has solicited the ultimate fanboy review before going to more critical reviewers. UPDATE: And they showed it to Jeffrey Wells.)

It cost $25 million. No stars. Do the math.

Here are portions of Knowles' rave:

The movie is fucking brilliant. It’s what we were told it was going to be. An intimate perspective on an impossibly grand scale human disaster beyond most human levels of comprehension.

What is the monster? How do you describe something that doesn’t look like anything you’ve ever seen before? It’s not a fucking upright walking whale. It doesn’t look like any iteration of GODZILLA that we’ve ever seen. It is enormous. And even though I’ve seen it… I am hard-pressed to come up with a comparative creation. You know that big fucking thing in THE MIST? It isn’t that. Is the creature a biped? I’m not sure, I think it might’ve been a four-legged beastie… it has a tail, it has teeth and freaky eyes like that horse that died in ANIMAL HOUSE. It’s kinda of a grayish-yellowish-off-white looking thing. But more important than the creature is what this fucker does. He basically goes bug-nuts.

The creature isn’t the groundbreaking thing about the film. It is, but it isn’t.

You see, what has me so excited about this film is that this is the giant monster movie that isn’t at all like any giant monster movie we’ve seen before… but is exactly that movie.

I guarantee you that as this movie takes place… all the shit that you’ve seen in Giant monster movies is happening. Somewhere a general is screaming about nuking New York…. Somewhere is a politician screaming that you can’t nuke New York. Another General wants to know why our weapons are not affecting this thing. A PRESIDENT wants to know where it came from – and several thousand journalist are trying to figure all that out too.

But this film isn’t about the scientist, the generals, the Presidents, the mayors or any of the big people. This time, the film is from the perspective of those people that live in those buildings that the monster is breaking through. This is about the people running in the street that scream, “GODZILLA!!!” and run. This is about trying to survive that insanity. Not just that, but to try and save one life.

Like SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, but instead of Nazis it’s a giant monster.

This is a handheld camera movie – knowing this and knowing not to sit too close is probably a good thing… but having said that… you can’t sit far enough from the screen to feel safe. As many of you people know, I am in a wheelchair – and while watching movies, I have my brakes on. There was one moment, so unexpected and so intense that I went 3 ft back.

J.J. Abrams produced and came up with the concept; the script was written by Lost collaborator Drew Goddard, working closely with Abrams and and his Felicity collaborator Matt Reeves, who directed. To suggest that Reeves did not direct this is silly. Movies are by their nature collaborative.

Again, the queasicam aesthetic is here to stay. Directors like Paul Greengrass and Kevin MacDonald and yes, Matt Reeves are answering a moviegoer demand for authenticity. In this case, it's about taking something unbelievable and making it seem real. No matter how much fake movie magic it requires.

UPDATE: Fandango has a new clip, in which the monster seems to go by, real fast. And speculates about the meanings behind the title.

There's some new info on Cloverfield in this week's column. I saw some scattered scenes on an Avid, not the whole movie. But I got a good sense of the film, and can't wait to see the whole thing. Paramount is purposely holding back on screenings--there's no junket at all--because they want to preserve as much of the mystery that has worked so well for them. They'll start screening the film next week.

Cloverfield not only reveals the monster several times in several ways, says director Matt Reeves, but "by the end you have intimate contact." Also, Cloverfield was always the film's title. The strategy was to go out with an untitled trailer, which referred to 1.18.08, the release date. Then when the internet took off with the early trailer, the filmmakers needed to use fake titles like Cheese in order to shoot around New York.

Moviemarketingmadness updates the movie.

Sweeney Todd opened to excellent reviews (87% fresh on Rottentomatoes.com) and strong initial numbers on Friday, but the movie dropped an estimated 28 % (actually 25%) between Friday and Saturday. (Here's Sunday's Variety weekend boxoffice report.) This indicates that many viewers were lured by Paramount's mainstream horror-driven ad campaign, which did not sell the film as a Stephen Sondheim musical, and walked away disappointed. (The company also seeded the internet with clips showing the musical numbers.) Selling a unique movie like this, where there is no tried-and-true pattern to follow, is admittedly tricky. So Paramount made the call to go wide with 1200 runs--and not build the movie from fewer runs in sophisticated urban markets. It now looks like Dreamworks' initial strategy might have been the right way to go. That way early adopters would spread good word and build an audience slowly over time, rather than folks being lured into seeing a movie that they wind up not liking--and spreading bad word.

Sweeney Todd is a great movie. But it is the kind of unusual and arty film that requires delicate, special handling. OK, so what if it isn't a movie with mass-market appeal? Will the Academy come through for a great film that is tainted in the marketplace? And what happened with the Screen Actors Guild bypassing Sweeney? It's quite possible that many of the SAG committee members did not see the late-breaking Sweeney; the DVD finally went out Saturday.

UPDATE: According to DreamWorks, the plan was to start at 800 screens; based on tracking and reaction to the movie they expanded to l200. The two studios agreed to the plan. There were several different spots for the movie, some with music, some not.

Guillermo Del Toro has put up a trailer for his next, Hellboy II: The Golden Army.

Harry Knowles has a clip from Cloverfield, Paramount's new monster movie due January 18.

Chris Nolan has shot several sequences of The Dark Knight--due next summer--in IMAX. Here's the promo featurette:

Writer-director Mitchell Lichtenstein's feminist horror comedy Teeth is a must-see for women who can handle some ultra-violence and men who can handle the subject matter. Here's the trailer. Virginal high school student Dawn (Jess Weixler, who won an acting prize at Sundance) tamps down her budding sexuality by volunteering at a local chastity group. Provoked by her nasty stepbrother Brad (John Hensley), Dawn unwittingly discovers that she has a toothed vagina (vagina dentata) more than willing to fight back against unwelcome intruders. Dawn struggles to understand, control and accept her unusual anatomy. Roadside Attractions will open the horror pic in February, more than a year after its debut at Sundance.

The Circuit's Mike Jones swears that no animals were hurt while making this AFM video:

Saw IV butchered the weekend boxoffice, natch. Here's Variety's Sunday b.o report and review. I have never seen a Saw movie, and probably never will. Saw's strength suggests that despite the recent decline in the fortunes of torture porn, established franchises with brand cred like Saw and Resident Evil can still do well.

Here's Pamela McClintock's astute analysis of the depressed fall boxoffice, which is down from last year by 6 %. There were too many R-rated dark-themed movies and too many indie pics crowding theaters and scrabbling to keep screens when they need time to build word-of-mouth. Thursday, the LAT took a stab at the indie boxoffice, without making clear distinctions between limited and wide releases and long-playing and short-term pics. MCN's David Poland adds his take: in the long term, many of these pics will catch up with last years equivalents. McClintock points out that the pattern is: summer tentpoles, softer entries in September and October, holiday tentpoles.

Salon lists The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Torture.

And this 2001 article posits a 20-year cycle theory on horror films. Hmmm.

DVD Spindoctor is making daily Halloween week scary movie picks.

UPDATE: The second annual After Dark Horrorfest runs from November 9 – 18th on over 300 AMC, Regal and Cinemark screens across the U.S. Horrorfest 2007 will premiere 8 Films to Die For, scary flicks that run the gamut of horror: from thrillers to gore to the supernatural. Here's the lineup:

[Seven Days of Halloween graphic courtesy of DVD Spindoctor]

There's a hint of Psycho screeching violins in the score of the second Sweeney Todd trailer. The music is Stephen Sondheim, but there's no singing in this one. It's the R-rated horror Halloween version.

As Halloween approaches, EW extracts John Carpenter's scariest moments. I knew Carpenter well at the start of his career, when he was still an indie maverick making Halloween, The Fog and Escape from New York. Crews and actors loved him. But he never delivered on his promise inside the studio system.

Stephen King gets in the Halloween mood.

And here's a list of the most controversial horror flicks ever, like Luis Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou (right). That woman is about to get her eye sliced with a razor.

The London Times chooses the top 13 scariest horror scenes ever. Be afraid. Very afraid. [Hat Tip: Colin Boyd.]

When I was a kid, I was terrified by three movies: Robert Wise's The Haunting, which featured a menacing house that pounded, turned doorknobs, wrote notes on the wall to "Eleanor" and morphs a young girl in her bed into a old woman banging on the ceiling with a cane. That'll scare anyone.

The Window is a tight little thriller about a little boy (Bobby Driscoll, who won a special Academy Award) who witnesses a murder. No grownup will believe him while he is being chased--and caught--by the bad guys. He's utterly on his own.

In Mirage, Gregory Peck keeps seeing the image of a watermelon splatting on the pavement--he's traumatized by having seen someone fall out of a high rise to their death. He's lost his memory and keeps getting lost in the wrong stairwell.

Nothing has ever scared me as much since.

There is that wonderful moment at the end of Brian De Palma's Carrie (my favorite film of his) when the arm reaches up through the grave. Ridley Scott's Alien has the creature busting out of John Hurt's stomach. George Romero's original Night of the Living Dead is one of the creepiest movies ever made. And this list's number one choice, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, is packed with truly scary stuff--like the blood rising out of the elevator. Redrum. Redrum.

Would-be horror writer Jose Luis Calva was arrested in Mexico City when police investigating the disappearance of his girlfriend discovered her dismembered body in his apartment:

Jose Luis Calva told police he had boiled some of his girlfriend's flesh but that he hadn't eaten it, the spokesman said.

The official also confirmed other details released by the prosecutor's office Wednesday night: that body parts were spread throughout the apartment, and that Calva is being investigated in the deaths of three women whose mutilated bodies had been found in and around the capital.

How soon before someone gobbles up the film rights to this?

Premiere's Glenn Kenny does not buy Nikki Finke's Elle.com suggestion that a Hollywood blogger can change the way the studios do business.

This announcement grabbed my attention. Maybe it's because it's a movie musical with an interesting title, maybe because it's being directed by a horror film refugee and it's based on a musical play. (Sweeney Todd meets The Phantom of the Opera!) Lionsgate starts principal photography this week in Toronto on Repo! The Genetic Opera, starring an odd assortment of actor/singers: debuting musical theater star Sarah Brightman (Phantom of the Opera), Anthony Head (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Paris Hilton (oy), Bill Moseley (The Devil's Rejects), Paul Sorvino (Goodfellas), & Alexa Vega (Spy Kids).

The director is Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw II, III, and IV, due October 26) from a screenplay by Terrence Zdunich and Darren Smith, co-creators of the original stage production. Japanese musician, songwriter and composer Yoshiki is producing the film’s soundtrack.

Lionsgate is obviously backing their in-house director, Bousman, who is a passionate devotee of this genre-bending bizarre future fantasy world: he directed the first Los Angeles stage production in 2002 as well as a 2006 short film version. The plot is worthy of Richard Kelly's Southland Tales: after an epidemic of organ failures devastates the planet, killing tens of millions, scientists make plans for a massive organ harvest program. Biotech conglom GeneCo offers payment plans to those lacking funds to purchase new body parts: but financed organs are subject to default and repossession at the hands of organ repo men.

This is one of those projects that could be fresh and fun or gross and godawful. I've never seen the Saw pictures, so I have no idea if this guy can direct or not.

Twisted Pictures, headed by Mark Burg and Oren Koules, also produced the Saw franchise and Catacombs, part of their nine-pic deal with Lionsgate.

Here's Michael Haneke's 1997 version, starring The Lives of Other's Ulrich Muhe.

And here's the 2007 version, ten years later, starring Tim Roth, Naomi Watts and Michael Pitt:

Tartan Warner Independent plans to release Funny Games in February 2008.

[Posted by Peter Debruge]
I have an unnatural preoccupation with Uwe Boll, the director fanboys love to hate. Why do they despise him so? In their eyes, Boll butchers their favorite videogames by directing nonsensical adaptations of Alone in the Dark, BloodRayne and House of the Dead (the latter inexplicably intercuts shots from the first-person-shooter zombie game with frantic action scenes).

Is the German-born Boll any worse than all the low-budget genre directors working today? Not necessarily. He just catches flak for defiling hardcore gamers’ sacred cows. But Boll's strategy is pretty clever, when you think about it, since the popularity of the titles compels studios to give him decent budgets and respected actors to make his movies.

Personally, I’m not so sure someone like Peter Jackson could do much better with the same material, but it’s always entertaining to see how the fan community reacts to the latest Boll “abomination.” Variety’s own Dennis Harvey attended the San Francisco premiere of Postal (another vidgame adaptation, this one doubling as post-9/11 satire) and didn’t completely hate it.

A couple writers from Wired caught the screening, too, instigating an angry (and amusing) back-and-forth with the director over the nasty remarks in their review. Boll writes:

Chris wrote that article in bad faith to damage me. His whole goal is to destroy my business. If he cannot see that scenes (for example WELFARE OFFICE, Job Interview) are genius in that movie - then there are 2 possibilities: he is dump and has no idea what movies are or he hates me and is dissappointed about his own shitty career.

He ignored also that the audience enjoyed the movie and tons of other critics LOVED it.

That’s right. Boll referred to the “genius” of his own work. “Tons” of critics loved it. Those late to the Boll bandwagon are in luck. He has three more films in the can: BloodRayne: Deliverance (a straight-to-video sequel that inexplicably takes place halfway across the world a full century later), Seed (which sounds like that Cleaver movie on The Sopranos) and In the Name of the King (a Dungeon Siege vidgame adaptation starring Jason Statham and Burt Reynolds).

The Invasion, Warner Bros. and producer Joel Silver's troubled remake of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers--which for some strange reason does not lean on that recognizable title--did not play well in Comic-Con. Nor is it screening any better here. The troubled production, for which the Wachowski brothers apparently did reshoots, was expensive, too: some $80-million, I hear. Aren't horror classics supposed to be remade on the cheap?

Here's the Variety review. Safe to say, this is not a rave: "a slick but forgettable characterless thriller," writes Dennis Harvey.

This Spanish thriller got great notices in Cannes and brooks comparison to The Others. Presenter Guillermo del Toro is mentoring young director J.A. Bayona. The picture stars Belen Rueda of The Sea Inside, and is expected to be the Spanish submission for the Oscar. The Orphanage opens in Spain on October 11 (this is a Spanish trailer) and stateside on December 28.