READ PART TWO

Over the past few years, we've begun to see more and more films remade, with varying degrees of success. Even though the originals are still there, in their original form, people still get up in arms about the idea of someone coming along and ruining their nostalgia. To me, the purpose of a remake is to improve upon, update or completely redo the premise of a previously existing film. Take, for instance, Carpenter's The Thing or Cronenberg's The Fly. Even though these are actually based on a novella and short story, respectively, we can"t help comparing them to their previous celluloid incarnations, which provide a totally different experience, both viscerally and story-wise. Point being: they're both great examples of how a remake/re-imagining should be done.

The one thing that gets me really excited about the remake cycle we're in right now is that Hollywood is starting to remake films I never really liked in the first place. It just makes more sense to go back and redo properties that weren't as good as they could have been, since there's room for improvement. The House On Sorority Row, which tells the story of a prank gone horribly wrong and the murderous consequences that follow, happens to be one of those films that I have absolutely no stake in. I know it has a cult following but, aside from a decapitated head being found in a toilet bowl, there"s nothing that stood out to me as being fun. I always thought it was one of the blander slashers to come out of the 80's.

Summit's Sorority Row - written by Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg, and directed by Stewart Hendler - only uses the original's premise as a jumping-off point, becoming something very different from there on out. "There's no real comparison to plot with the original," says Stolberg. "There's the general idea - sorority prank goes awry and chaos ensues ñ but there's not a character that's the same. There's not a kill that's the same. There's not a plot point really that's the same." Having just read the script, I couldn't agree more.

Being a genre fan himself, Stolberg has the same point of view on remakes as a lot of other horror lovers do and tried to be respectful to the original while breathing new life into the property. "I understand that there's the attitude that there's a dearth of original material in Hollywood and I agree. I totally agree... I forget who it was, but it was a pretty famous dude who had a quote about you wanting to remake the bad movies because they can stand improving. I love [The House On] Sorority Row. I absolutely love it, but let's be serious in that it's a cult classic. I don't know if it would be considered a classic. I felt like there was definitely a story there and I feel like our approach to the story was something fun."

Growing up on a steady diet of Hitchcock, Stolberg describes his take on Sorority Row as being in the same vein as Scream or I Know What You Did Last Summer. "I only hope that this movie hits on that kind of a level, or on either of those levels. Who knows whether it will, but approaching the script and Stewart in approaching the directing, that was the thing that we kept coming back to: that this is less of a straight up horror movie. It's not Michael Myers slow walking. No talking, night stalking guy where you see him from frame one and you know who the bad guy is. This is more of a thriller; a little action-y type thing. It's definitely a whodunit... We've provided probably ten different red herrings that it could be, depending on whether you know the original movie ... Hopefully, if we've done our job right and Stewart has done his job right, which I know he will, there will be five or six reversals during the course of the film as to who you think it is and hopefully it won't come out of really far left field."

Not knowing what to expect when given the script by his agent, since he had never seen the original, Hendler was blown away by Goldfinger and Stolberg's manuscript and met with the studio soon after. "The script is very tongue-in-cheek, it's very self-aware, it's sort of having fun with the genre, and I went into [the meeting] and was basically like, it could go two ways: it can be campy horror, exploitative, hot girls getting murdered and boobs all over the place, or it can be really fun. It can be one of those movies that's in the world of Scream that is playing with the conventions and having a good time. I figured I'd risk it, and I went in there and said, This is like Mean Girls meets Scream, and you can kick me out of the room if you want." And they're like, "Totally, that's exactly the movie we want to make." And from there on out we've been on the same page."

Hendler really enjoyed the idea of Sorority Row being an ensemble piece and is extremely happy with the cast he ended up with. Being friends with the director of Step Up 2, one of the first actresses he thought of was Briana Evigan. "She plays a very street-smart girl in the movies she does," and I said, "Can you be a sorority girl? You know, definitely the outsider of the bunch, but this is a bit of a departure for you." She said, "As long as the movie's having fun with that culture, a send-up - and a celebration - of sorority life, then I'm totally in." The movies that we're referencing are Bring It On or Heathers, movies that are taking a world and having a good time just dissecting it, being brutally honest about it, and making as much fun of it as they are enjoying it. She and I were in sync on that. Then the fun was just packaging the rest of the girls around her. I could not be more thrilled with where we ended up."

After being approached to pen the remake, Stolberg found his inspiration for the film"s opening in an old idea he'd been kicking around with Goldfinger for quite a while. "We'd been working on this script about ten years ago that we never finished, but we had this opening to the movie that I was really, really excited about. When I re-watched Sorority Row and we started pitching around ideas about where we might want to take this, where's an interesting place to take the remake, both of us instantly remembered this scene that we had written and said, 'Wow, that's the opening to our movie,' which is exactly what we're shooting right now. Everything just kind of fell in place from there and we did the remake."