Get in line for a holiday horror

Silent night . . . gory night.

While millions of people head to midnight Christmas Mass this evening, legions of young men will be standing in line in Los Angeles and New York for a Midnight Mass-Acre website early screening of the new horror film “Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem,” which officially opens Tuesday.

“It defies the conventional holiday movie,” says 20th Century Fox spokesman Gregg Brilliant. “The advertising tag line [for the film] is, ‘This Christmas there will be no peace on Earth.’ This is counter-programming for a young male audience.”

Such a strategy during the holiday season is nothing new. Over the decades, there have been several Christmas-themed horror films, such as “Silent Night, Bloody Night,” and the last two yuletide seasons brought gore-athons from Dimension Films, “Wolf Creek” and “Black Christmas.”

(This holiday season, horror fans also have “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” although purists may object to it being a musical.)

But “Wolf Creek” and “Black Christmas” didn’t have the fan base of “Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem.” The “Alien” franchise began in 1979 with Ridley Scott’s seminal sci-fi horror film. That classic spawned three more entries, all starring Sigourney Weaver as the intrepid Ripley. The first “Predator,” starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers, scored a hit in summer 1987; a sequel followed three years later.

In 2004, Fox married the franchises. “Alien vs. Predator” didn’t dazzle critics but took in $171.3 million internationally. The ancillary markets for the franchises also have been lucrative. “There are a slew of comic books, graphic novels and video games,” Brilliant says.

In the latest chapter in the series, the creatures invade a small American town. The movie introduces a new character -- the Predalien -- described as an Alien that has been incubated inside a Predator, rendering it 80% Alien and 20% Predator.

Fox hopes the “AVP” die-hards will embrace the Midnight Mass-Acre screenings. “We wanted to create an event for the movie that would be for the hard-core fans,” says Brilliant. The first 100 standing in line at the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood this evening will receive a limited edition T-shirt that commemorates the screening.

“The fans made this franchise,” Brilliant says. “There are a lot of [movie] events, but I don’t think there is any quite like this.”

-- Susan King