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95 Piccadilly

By Shane Gilreath

For a time, as a kid, I thought I’d be a filmmaker. Heaven knows why! I was an eclectic kid with big dreams and a bigger imagination. The sky seemed the limit, full of stars crafted by a Hollywood machine. To be fair, there were many, many “I want to be…” conversations, but that was one of them, long before Hollywood began to lose its sparkle. Writer, other than authoring the many bad screenplays I managed – literally, pen to paper – had not yet crossed my mind. When friends were reading comic books, I obsessed over old Hollywood, the studio system, and its many stars. Like sugarplums, technicolor masterpieces floated above my head. On some sleepless nights, you might still find me gleefully watching TMC and counting the stars, mesmerized by faces long forgotten by modern pop culture. Then, in some curious alternative, there was the side of young me that was engrossed by the horror genre, perhaps because I’d checked out every book on the likes of Bogie and Bacall that our local library offered. Horror was all that was left. Or, perhaps, because there’s a wannabe hero in side of every young boy and there tends to be like-minded chap standing alongside a pretty girl in horror films. Knee high to a grasshopper, that can seem the life! Horror – mostly campy monster movies – might have kept me up at night, but I watched them on repeat nonetheless. When not obsessing over the Monster Squad, which flopped dreadfully at the box office but seemed to have all my friends and I enraptured, I became obsessed with another film: Fright Night. Unlike Monster Squad, Fright Night was a bit out of my emotional league. My mother asked repeatedly that I not watch it. Even after I began doing so obsessively, she asked again and again. I was roughly ten and she knew better than I the sleepless outcome of vampire films, but I watched it over and over again despite her objections. I have no idea why it appealed to me, but as I got older (and the film spawned sequels and remakes) it became clear that I was not alone. So, imagine my surprise, recently, when my friend, filmmaker Kenny Scott Guffey reached out to tell me about his upcoming project: a dramatized live reading of Tom Holland’s – you guessed it – Fright Night. (For more details, see www.facebook.com/frightnightplay). I was, of course, intrigued. It took me back a few years, not only to the youngster with his head in the stars, but it proved one of those moments – oddly enough through a horror film – that felt full circle, as if life has a unique purpose and each of our experiences are more than mere coincidence, crafted and polished into gems far more astute than any script I might have ever written.

Tom Holland’s Fright Night will broadcast on January 30, 2025 at 7pm. The event is free and hosted by Kings of Horror.