WHEN I WAS A KID, IT was very common to have a Saturday matinee – the purpose of which was to indoctrinate children into the act of going to the movies so they would grow up and become moviegoers,” Joe Dante tells SFX. It’s a pastime he celebrated in his nostalgic 1993 fantasy satire Matinee.
“On Saturdays, they would run 10 cartoons, a serial chapter and two features. They would run Tarzan movies, Westerns, old horror pictures – anything that was suitable for kids. It was a wonderful tradition, and I think my generation really became movie fans because of the Saturday matinee.”
After directing the self-aware sequel to his original classic Gremlins, Dante, along with his regular writing partner Michael Finnell, shopped around the story. Set in 1962, it went through an interesting gestation period.
“[It started out] more of a kind of fantasy about a bunch of people who are grown up and all assemble at this movie theatre they used to go to all the time,about how they thought the theatre was haunted and that the projectionist was a vampire – it was a very far-afield version of this story. The only thing that was true to both versions was the presence of ”
