Damien Woodhouse who lives with his father, Mr. Satan Woodhouse

Enough with the zombies, the vampires and the sea monsters!  I’m with Laura Miller. The time has come to avenge this relentless invasion, and send some Jane Austen characters in to stanch the blood dimmed tide of CGI and 3D. 

Here, Austenized for your amusement, three Hollywood horror classics, re-energized with the kind of rigorous moral message and redemptive plots that have been entertaining readers for generations.

Redrum Park

Poor Mrs. Price. She thought she’d married a good man, but he turned out to be the worst sort imaginable, a writer.  One day she finds her young daughter, Fanny, tricycling up and down the hallway babbling dyslexically. She sends her to live with her sister, Lady Bertram and her family who live at Redrum Park.

Fanny’s girl cousins are contemptuous of Fanny’s lurid backstory, but her cousin Edmund seems sympathetic.  Sir Thomas is rarely around, mostly visiting his plantation in Antigua, and tending to the family business (a popular brand of Caribbean spirits called Red Rum.) As a result, the Bertram girls have gone a little wild.

One day they invite their friends Henry and Mary Crawford over  and do something unspeakably wicked. They put on a play!  Still suffering from a post-traumatic fiction disorder going back to her terrible childhood, Fanny becomes increasingly anxious. Henry, who clearly has literary ambitions, finds her neurosis strangely compelling. When he proposes marriage, Fanny reverts to her odd tricycle riding compulsion, muttering “Murder Krap, Murder Krap” over and over again.  Her cousins misunderstand this as some kind of theatre critic manifesto, alienating her even further.

When Sir Thomas returns, he is furious that Fanny has refused a good marriage proposal, and left tire marks up and down the hallways.  He sends Fanny back home.

Not much has changed.  Her father is writing the same novel he’s been writing for the last fifteen years, and her mother is in her usual state of frantic, bug-eyed despair. But when Maria Bertram runs off with Henry to Hollywood (where they are last seen working in restaurants and trying to get people to read their screenplays) Sir Thomas realizes his mistake.

Fanny returns to Redrum Park and marries Edmund.  They live happily ever after with their great dane, Scooby.


Damien

Young Damien Woodhouse lives with his father Mr. Satan Woodhouse. Damien has 30,000 pounds (which was a lot back then) and one day will have total dominion over the underworld, which has made him a little arrogant.  But after Damien discourages his overly loyal governess from throwing herself out the top story window, and then finds a nice man for her to marry, Damien develops the idea that he has “special” powers.

He begins a course of trying to improve the lives of people around him.  Mr. Knightley, a long time family friend, finds out that Damian is trying to matchmake the local vicar with Harriet Smith (a girl whose  parents might not actually be married!) He gives Damien a very stern lecture.

Sure enough the young vicar falls instead for Damien and begs to spend the rest of his life as his same sex, undead consort.  Damien is mortified, having now turned Harriet into an ambitious fangbanger who thinks so highly of herself that she actually thinks she has a chance with Mr. Knightley!  

This stirs up strange latent longings in Damien, not to mention something he’s never, ever felt before, remorse.  He   realizes that he shouldn’t interfere with the normal mores of society, no matter how rigid and ridiculous they are.  He should just keep doing what his powerful family has always done: let things go to crap all on their own.

Mr. Knightley declares his love for Damien. They move in together and consider surrogate motherhood (but during script development Roman Polanski was still under house arrest.)  Eventually they decide not to have any children, because they leave those scuff marks on the hallways, and Mr. Woodhouse is getting too old to carve the little numbers in their scalp. And, really, it’s not like the world needs any more evil, supernatural progeny.

Persuasion (release date: October 31)

He’s back.  Last time Anne Elliot (played here by Jamie Lee Curtis) saw Frederick Wentworth, he was trying to stab her to death in a closet.  Then his psychiatrist, Dr. Loomis, arrived to discourage the natural progress of their relationship by shooting Wentworth and throwing him off the balcony.

But Wentworth has recently returned as a much more successful stalker who has made his fortune in Hollywood from countless sequels and remakes.  The hearts of the young girls in Anne’s neighborhood are all aflutter.  Surely Wentworth will want to kill one of them!  Everyone is certain he’ll have lost interest in Anne, who is now a middle-aged woman married to an English Lord/comedian/director whose last movie was such a disappointment.

No one pays attention to Anne anymore. She has posed for magazines without the help of photoshop, and let her hair go gray!  For a while it looks like Wentworth might kill Louisa Musgrave. But then she falls down the stairs all on her own and gets a cold, which really stanches his momentum.

And something about Anne still haunts Wentworth. Which is why we find him,once again, doing his best to kill her. Dr. Loomis arrives, as always, convinced that his original strategy is the best.  But Anne is a very different woman now, with ideas of her own.  She stops Dr. Loomis, sits Wentworth down, and does what should have been done from the beginning. 

She forces him to listen repeatedly to audiotapes of her successful, politically correct children’s books. It doesn’t work.  But over time he becomes a different kind of insane. Less serial killer, more landed British gentry. A madness so much more civilized and permanent.