These days, telling you that a picture is coming out in 3-D isn’t a shock. Every genre flick, animated movie and Disney concert film is latching onto the trend in hopes of keeping audiences buying tickets instead of just waiting for the home video release. While some of these projects seem perfectly suited to the immersive experience, others are approaching 3-D as little more than a gimmicky afterthought.

Joe Dante’s THE HOLE is the latest 3-D movie on the horizon, but in this case, the process feels perfectly suited to the plot line. When Dane (Chris Massoglia) and his younger brother Nathan (Lucas Gamble), discover a gaping hole in the basement of their new home, they do what any two boys would do: They step in and check it out. Along with the fetching girl next door Julie (Haley Bennett), the trio discover that the hole unlocks the worst fears and nightmares of anyone who enters.

After a two-month shoot in Canada, THE HOLE’s production recently shifted to Los Angeles for a final week of exterior shooting to help sell the west coast suburban summer coast setting. Bloody-Disgusting was invited to the set for an exclusive visit. As an added treat, our visit happened to coincide with an amusing cameo appearance from Dante regular Dick Miller, best known to fans as the gremlin-phobic Murray Futterman of the GREMLINS series. Miller was playing a pizza delivery man in the scene we observed. The kids come to the door, take the pizza and shut the door in poor Dick Miller’s face while he holds his hand out for a tip. His look of disappointment is priceless.

In between takes, we spoke with Chris Massoglia, who had to choose his words carefully as he explained what THE HOLE is all about. Dante and co. are still keeping the specific details under a tight wrap for now, although next week’s Comic-Con could shed some additional light on the project. "I play the older brother," Massoglia tells BD. "It’s about this family that is going through some tough stuff. I’m a kid from New York and we’re moving to this small town in the west. I’m kind of pissed at my mom for moving. My character is very protective of his brother. There’s a lot of stuff hidden underneath [my character] that I don’t want people to see. We discover this hole in our basement. All this weird stuff starts coming out of it. We want to try to figure out what it is. As we try to figure out what’s going on, weirder and creepier stuff starts happening."

At first, Dane is unhappy about the move, but after meeting Julie and discovering the mystical happenings within his basement, he reconsiders. "Throughout the process, Dane, my character, develops a thing for the neighbor girl. He knows that if his mom finds out about the hole then she’ll want to move again and he doesn’t want to move now that he’s found a new girl to hang out with."

Although THE HOLE takes place on the west coast in the summer, the shoot took place primarily in Canada. The week of our visit was the only California portion of the shoot. "This is our last week, our third-to-last day," Dante tells BD. "It’s the L.A. portion of the shoot. We went to Canada to save money like everybody does. The only wrinkle was it’s set in the summer and we were in Canada in the Winter, so the exteriors obviously couldn’t be shot there. So we’re doing a week in L.A., just exteriors. This is pretty much connective tissue."

For Massoglia, who turned 17 in March, 2010 could be a breakout year. In addition to THE HOLE, he’ll also star as Darren Shan in Cirque Du Freak. The young actor says he was drawn to THE HOLE’s unique horror elements: "[The script] is not like monsters and spiders. It’s each person’s fears. What you are afraid of is what comes out of the hole. Each character in the movie has their separate fear and that plays in the movie to each person."

The project also gave him a chance to hone his acting chops with a genre veteran. "Joe definitely knows what he’s doing," says Massoglia. "You can tell from watching him set up the camera angles and talking to me about how a scene’s going to play out, how it’s going to cut together."

THE HOLE is aiming at a PG-13 release, but that doesn’t mean Dante will be pulling punches. After all, this is the man who pushed the boundaries of the PG rating to the limit on GREMLINS and forced the MPAA to first develop the PG-13 rating. "All I know is that the time that you release the movie and what’s happened around it colors what you can get away with," says Dante.

Walking that line between scary and too scary has always been a challenge for the director, who admits there is often no rhyme or reason to the MPAA’s oft-criticized rating methods. "You can go back and look at some R-rated pictures and they are so cut, you wonder why they even gave it an R. They could have given it a PG. And then you see other pictures that came out a year or two prior and they’re horrific and you go, ‘Wow, how come this didn’t get an X?’"

Added to that challenge is the immersive experience of the 3-D process. As if a black hole containing your worst fears wasn’t enough, the 3-D will take the audiences right inside the hole along with the characters. "I thought it would be nice to open this up somehow," says Dante. "I suggested it to the producers and we added a little bit to the budget to accommodate the 3-D."

"The 3-D is really cool," adds Massoglia. "I’ve just been looking at some of the footage and it looks really great. Even this scene where we were just sitting around in the kitchen just looks cool in 3-D. At first I wasn’t sure if it would be weird acting-wise, but it’s pretty much just like filming on a normal camera except that the cameras are bigger. There are some things where they want you to move a certain way or do something to appeal to the 3-D, but it’s cool and I can’t wait to see it all."

With the economic issues currently plaguing the U.S., there won’t be quite as many theaters available for 3-D showings as the producers might have originally hoped. But Dante remains confident that THE HOLE will play just fine in 2-D theaters.. "Look back at The Creature from the Black Lagoon. How many people have really seen it in 3-D? Nobody remembers it was 3-D and it’s a great 3-D movie."

As with all of Dante’s projects, story is tantamount and any gimmicks are just icing on the cake.

"The difference between this and the other horror movies that will come out is that this one is sort of family friendly," says Dante. "Kids can go with their parents. It’s not a childish movie. It has adult themes, but it’s nothing that you couldn’t take a kid to see. We hope that will differentiate us somewhat from the general run of [horror] pictures. They tend to be kind of similar."

We’ll have more on THE HOLE tomorrow during our exclusive interview with horror icon Joe Dante.