The next entry, directed by Eduardo Rodriguez, finds high school student Charlie attending a study abroad program with his horror obsessed friend Evil Ed and ex-girlfriend AMY in Romania. He soon discovers their young attractive professor Gerri (Murray) is a real life vampire. Too bad no one believes him. In fact, Evil Ed finds it amusing and it only feeds his vampire obsession. When Gerri turns Ed, Charlie seeks out Peter Vincent, the infamous vampire hunter (well, he plays one on TV) who is in Romania filming his show Fright Night, to teach him how to take down Gerri before she gets to Amy, whos blood will cure Gerri of spending eternity as a vampire.
Murray, always a pleasure to chat to, clearly relished the role and told us more about the experience after the jump!
Shock Till You Drop: With Dexter, Deaths of Ian Stone, Devil’s Playground and now Fright Night 2, you’re clearly not afraid to take on some horror roles…
Jaime Murray: I swear, it’s not a pre-conceived career strategy. I’ve gotten really close to normal [roles] but they never follow through. It’s always between me and another normal girl and the other normal girl was obviously more normal than me and got the role and I’d get another twisted, complex character. [laughs]
Shock: Do you get all self-analytical when that happens…
Murray: Aw, yeah, I’m such a good person, what is it they don’t see in me! [laughs] I give myself a hug, but I’m so generous that I’m willing to go to the dark side. But I have a lot of positivity and emotional buoyancy. I will say on Fright Night, it was just before Christmas and we were filming on location in Romania, blood cold, and I was reading some Freudian analysis of the vampire myth, the narcissism, you know, celebrity and stage moms and people who suck your life energy, vampiric narcissism – and in order to go there…not to take the piss out of the genre…I did have to have murderous thoughts. And I did think to myself, maybe my positivity and emotional buoyancy isn’t good enough to do too many of these films because I wasn’t sleeping that well. I felt kind of ugly and nasty and disgusting sometimes. [laughs] But hopefully that will make it fun for the audience to watch. I was covered in blood and there was a real ugliness to my vampire, she’s f**kin’ batshit crazy.
Shock: We don’t know much about the film other than the synopsis, so what’s the film like from your point of view?
Murray: The kids go to Romania and here we kind of look at the story of Elizabeth Bathory as inspiration. She may have been what the original vampire myth was based on. I just needed the blood of virgins. I play the Colin Farrell character and obviously he’s a man and Charlie is a man so they’re not going to “go there,” but the fact I’m a woman throws off a different dynamic. Charlie’s a teenage boy and my Gerri is a charismatic, charming, sexual woman – but there’s also something disturbing about her, so that’s fun to play with. There’s a cat and mouse power exchange. Women also have different abuses of power than men, manipulating and playing with you, which is always fun to play.
Shock: Is your Gerri related to Colin’s Jerry in any way?
Murray: Oh, we don’t look into my family tree. Colin is probably a younger vampire than I was. Because our film takes place with so much history, I’m probably an older vampire. But we’re all connected like if I gave you a nibble, we’d forever be connected, so maybe I gave Colin a nibble at one time, which would have been nice. [laughs]
Shock: How was Eduardo to work with?
Murray: He was great. He’s really creative and passionate. Got great visions and he has good fights. We thrashed it out because we both cared deeply about this world we were trying to tell, I loved working with him.
Shock: What separates the Fright Night stories from other vampire tales in your mind?
Murray: It’s the vampire next door thing. The franchise has comedy in horror, too, which is hard to pull off. You don’t want the comedy so close to the surface where the horror doesn’t impact you. Eduardo and I had conversations about the bits we wanted to wait and make truly frightening and ugly. Gerri and Colin’s Jerry are sexual and have a quickness of wit. Evil Ed’s character brings a lot of comedy. So there is some light relief after the ugly bits.
Shock: Speaking of ugly, I’m guessing we’re going to see the vampire creature side of you at some point…
Murray: That’s one of the many conversations I had with Eduardo is how ugly do we make her? She gets pretty f**king ugly. I kept saying, can we save the ugly for the end? I don’t know if the audience wants to see me that ugly. We worked that out along the way and we found a good balance.
Hopefully that gave you a taste of what’s to come. We’ll have more on Fright Night 2 very soon!
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