On the 2nd Day of Halloween, Blame the Screenwriter – All Blood Sucking Edition!

For those of you who don’t recall Blame the Screenwriter, it’s Burbanked’s whimsical feature in which I speculate, upon the opening Friday of three different movies, as to which one will take in the most weekend green at the box office, by comparing only the track records of each movie’s screenwriter.

Based on these criteria, you may be surprised to learn that my predictions have been consistently, colossally wrong.

As it happened, I promptly abandoned this feature once the summer movies started rolling out and it became clear that the contributions of the screenwriters had little to do with the success or failure of the movies.

In any event, today we see the jump-starting of Blame the Screenwriter, but with a twist. As an eager participant in today’s Vampire Blog-A-Thon being hosted by Nathaniel over at the Film Experience Blog, I thought I’d take a look back at the first three vampire movies that I can remember seeing in the theater at the time of their openings: Love at First Bite, Fright Night and The Lost Boys.

Can we guess, based on the filmographies of these movies’ writers, which of these three drained the most from the monetary vein of their respective eras’ moviegoers?

Movie title: Love At First Bite, 1979
Screenwriter: Robert Kaufman
Track record: Getting Straight, Freebie and the Bean, Nothing Personal
Uh-Oh: Wow. This dude was the go-to guy for undistinguished B-level comedy.
Blame the writer? As a writer, do you count yourself a success when you’ve reached your zenith with “With you, never a quickie. Always…a longie.“?

Movie title: Fright Night, 1985
Screenwriters: Tom Holland
Track record: Cloak & Dagger, Child’s Play, some low-end Stephen King adaptations.
Uh-Oh: Well, someone must have thought that Psycho II was a good idea.
Blame the writer? For all of its hokum, Fright Night is still pretty watchable. A lot of the basic vampire stuff is there, with a handful of bits you don’t expect. And if you were William Ragsdale, really what else would you want to be known for?

Movie title: The Lost Boys, 1987
Screenwriters: Janice Fischer & James Jeremias and Jeffrey Boam
Track record: A one-hit wonder for Fischer & Jeremias. Boam, on the other hand, had a bunch of solid blockbusters including The Dead Zone, Innerspace, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Lethal Weapon 2 and 3.
Uh-Oh: Not much point pinning the Chevy Chase stinker Funny Farm on Boam at this point; the screenwriter passed away in 2000.
Blame the writer? The Lost Boys is pretty solid 80’s cheese. Teen angst + dueling Coreys x Early Overblown Schumacher = Good Teenagey Fun.

So who do you blame, children of the night? Which of these vampire movies from the early days of my burgeoning film education would you guess scored the biggest arterial splash at the box office?

I was surprised by the answer when I looked it up. Find out after the jump.

Now admittedly it’s a bit of an exercise to compare box office grosses between films from different decades, etc. But if we toss all of that out and compare the numbers (from boxofficemojo.com), we get a bit of a shocker:

Love at First Bite was the biggest hit of these three films!

I don’t know about you, but I figured that The Lost Boys would have been the easy winner here. My memory of that time period was that Boys was HUGE that summer – the soundtrack was everywhere, people were talking about the movie; hell, I might have even gone to see it twice.

But Love at First Bite? Really? It had its charms, sure, but within both the vampire and romantic comedy genres it straddled, I never considered it more than a trifle, a middling effort. I’m still a little shocked that it was the first real vampire movie I ever saw in the theater. And I’m a little shocked that I’ve admitted that to you.

For what it’s worth, Fright Night was definitely my favorite of these three. I saw it at the drive-in with a group of friends, sitting outside the car on lawn chairs while the blackened sky lit up with heat lightning throughout the film. It was terrific – a great spooky movie on an atmospheric night I’ll never forget.

That’s the power of a good movie. And the power of a good vampire movie.

That’s all for me! Go visit the Vampire Blog-a-Thon and take a look at what everybody else is saying.