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The Nora Ephron-directed romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle turns 25 today. For Gary Foster, who first read the cross-country romantic comedy as a Jeff Arch spec script and fought for three years to keep its vision intact in the usual creative collisions of star-driven studio films, here provides an illuminating look at how a good spec evolved into a terrific movie.

On a hot Saturday afternoon in 1990, I sat down on a small couch in our baby daughter Kayla’s room to read a script entitled Sleepless in Seattle. Dave Warden, an agent representing a new writer named Jeff Arch, had submitted it to my company. I give most submissions 25 pages, and if I’m not in by that point, I put it down and pick up the next. That afternoon, I never noticed the 25-page mark. I zoomed right past it, drawn into this story about a widower, who...

Ever since it took off three decades ago with the likes of Halloween and Friday The 13th, the teen-slasher subgenre has been an unstoppable force in horror cinema. These films are a pleasure for certain scream fans and regular Friday-night moviegoers alike—and not a guilty one, despite what they’ve become. The youth-stalker flicks of today have become formulaic and largely substance-free, with the same group of annoying characters being (thankfully) killed off in pretty much the same order under the same circumstances.

So what keeps us coming? Even though they’ve been done to death, some of these killfests—such as Dark Ride, (part of the After Dark Horrorfest)—are simply done well. Director Craig Singer, who penned the film with Robert Dean Klein, doesn’t deviate much from the formula but rather embraces it, taking us on a far-from-perfect but fun and bloody ride.

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