phantomstranger
01-22-2007, 01:57 PM
12:00 AM, 19-JANUARY-07
Trick Is Halloween Treat
Michael Dougherty, who makes his feature-film directing debut with the upcoming Trick 'r Treat, told SCI FI Wire that the supernatural horror film is based on an idea that's been in his head for years. Dougherty, who co-wrote Superman Returns, began with a drawing of Sam, a child-sized masked character from his days as an animation student at New York University, which led to a short film and eventually evolved into a full-fledged script interweaving four stories about Halloween in a small town.
"Each one kind of focuses on a different time period in your life," Dougherty said in an interview during a break in filming on the movie's set in Vancouver, Canada, earlier this week. He added: "The stories' progress is very similar to how our lives progress: ... The first story is very much about a father and his son, a 6-year-old boy. And then when you get to the next story, it's a bunch of kids between 12 and 15, and what it's like to roam on your own and kind of you're up to no good. And then the next story involves a group of characters in their 20s, and that's when Halloween becomes about sex, and it's about getting sexy costumes and finding someone to hook up with and getting drunk and going to parties. And then the final story is very much the lonely, ... crotchety old man that we're all destined to become, maybe, and what it's like to deal with ... Halloween by yourself in the later years, the twilight years."
Bryan Singer, who directed Superman Returns and X2, which Dougherty also co-wrote, produces Trick 'r Treat. The film stars X2's Brian Cox as the old man and Anna Paquin as one of the 20-something women.
Dougherty said he's trying to return to an earlier kind of horror filmmaking, inspired by John Carpenter's Halloween and John Landis' An American Werewolf in London, though one of the genre's current trends has been extreme torture and violence, a la Hostel.
"I'm actually very happy with where horror has been and I think is going," Dougherty said. "I think we're in a very lucky period, where there's such a diverse range of horror subgenres. But this subgenre ... kind of went away, and I just kind of want to bring it back." Trick 'r Treat is wrapping production, with an eye to an Oct. 5 release. —Patrick Lee, News Editor
Trick Is Halloween Treat
Michael Dougherty, who makes his feature-film directing debut with the upcoming Trick 'r Treat, told SCI FI Wire that the supernatural horror film is based on an idea that's been in his head for years. Dougherty, who co-wrote Superman Returns, began with a drawing of Sam, a child-sized masked character from his days as an animation student at New York University, which led to a short film and eventually evolved into a full-fledged script interweaving four stories about Halloween in a small town.
"Each one kind of focuses on a different time period in your life," Dougherty said in an interview during a break in filming on the movie's set in Vancouver, Canada, earlier this week. He added: "The stories' progress is very similar to how our lives progress: ... The first story is very much about a father and his son, a 6-year-old boy. And then when you get to the next story, it's a bunch of kids between 12 and 15, and what it's like to roam on your own and kind of you're up to no good. And then the next story involves a group of characters in their 20s, and that's when Halloween becomes about sex, and it's about getting sexy costumes and finding someone to hook up with and getting drunk and going to parties. And then the final story is very much the lonely, ... crotchety old man that we're all destined to become, maybe, and what it's like to deal with ... Halloween by yourself in the later years, the twilight years."
Bryan Singer, who directed Superman Returns and X2, which Dougherty also co-wrote, produces Trick 'r Treat. The film stars X2's Brian Cox as the old man and Anna Paquin as one of the 20-something women.
Dougherty said he's trying to return to an earlier kind of horror filmmaking, inspired by John Carpenter's Halloween and John Landis' An American Werewolf in London, though one of the genre's current trends has been extreme torture and violence, a la Hostel.
"I'm actually very happy with where horror has been and I think is going," Dougherty said. "I think we're in a very lucky period, where there's such a diverse range of horror subgenres. But this subgenre ... kind of went away, and I just kind of want to bring it back." Trick 'r Treat is wrapping production, with an eye to an Oct. 5 release. —Patrick Lee, News Editor