He Has the Fright Stuff : Movies: James Dearden’s sense of the macabre came through in ‘Fatal Attraction.’ He’s at it again with ‘A Kiss Before Dying.’

Screenwriter and director James Dearden is fascinated with the dark side of human relationships, and the obsessions that can create chaos--or worse--in people’s everyday lives.

“People are utterly unknowable,” Dearden said. “One of the things that intrigues me is how people can be a mystery however much we think we know them.”

In Dearden’s new film, “A Kiss Before Dying,” young Jonathan Corlis (played by Matt Dillon) is a charming and ambitious guy any man would want for a son and any mother would want her daughter to marry. He is also, however, a merciless, emotionless killer, determined to destroy anyone who gets in his path to corporate success, whether it’s his fiancee or a fellow student who recognizes him for what he is.

Dearden, who received an Oscar nomination for his “Fatal Attraction” screenplay, sees a similar theme in all of his films--”The obsessive nature of the quest. Jonathan’s obsession with success is similar to the Glenn Close character’s obsession (in “Fatal Attraction”) and Pascali’s” in 1988’s “Pascali’s Island,” Dearden’s first feature directing gig. “And loneliness,” he continues. “I think they’re all lonely people in their different ways. I tend to be attracted to plots that close in on the character.”

“I found it interesting that Jonathan does everything that we’re supposed to admire now,” Dearden says. “He sets goals and achieves them, he’s hard-working, he stops at nothing, and he also reinvents himself, something peculiarly American.”

Dillon was Dearden’s first choice for Jonathan. “The thing about Matt is that he has a flash point which makes him an exciting actor. There are plenty of guys who could have played it for charisma and charm but they didn’t have that dark undercurrent. He had to do these terrible things and then go back into being this guy any girl would love to walk up the aisle with. I think he’s like Montgomery Clift crossed with Robert Mitchum, vulnerability mixed with the macho thing Mitchum has. There were other people we thought of, but you couldn’t see them putting their hands around someone’s neck and squeezing.”

The movie, the second to be based on Ira Levin’s 1950s bestseller (it was made into a film in 1956 starring Robert Wagner and Joanne Woodward), also stars Sean Young as Dillon’s wife, Max von Sydow and Diane Ladd. It opens Friday.

“A lot of black comedy is intended in the movie . . . some sly moments you chuckle over. I have a macabre sense of humor,” the 41-year-old Dearden laughs, during an interview in his hotel suite. He cites a Grand Guignol body dismemberment in “Kiss” while an Abbott & Costello routine plays on a television in the background.

“I also have a fear of things going wrong . . . and I think that is what ‘Fatal Attraction’ was about,” he says. “Taking absolutely banal everyday situations which 99 times out of a hundred would pass without incident and seeing what could go wrong. It is a kind of exercise in paranoia.”

Dearden laughs when asked if he is prone to paranoia, but admits his attitude might well be traced to the day his mother, Melissa Stribling, an actress in several campy British “Dracula” films, came home “after being vampirized by Christopher Lee,” he laughs, “with plastic blood down her neck. That may be the key.” Dearden’s father, director Basil Dearden (“Sapphire,” “Khartoum”), was killed in a car crash in 1971.

Dearden admits his macabre outlook is also “probably a defensive thing,” caused by his education at Eton and Oxford University, where he majored in French literature. “I was relatively classless,” he says of his presence in two of England’s aggressively upper-class educational institutions. “I didn’t really fit in,” he says. “That always made me feel slightly an exile.

“A macabre sense of humor is very much an English way of staving off disaster,” he laughs uneasily. Appropriately, Dearden’s first film was “The Contraption,” an eight-minute short about a man building a giant mousetrap in which he decapitates himself. It was written and starred Dearden’s friend Richard O’Brien, author of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” and won the Silver Bear at the 1978 Berlin Film Festival.

Dearden disagrees that “Fatal Attraction” launched the romantic thriller boom and, in fact, does not consider “A Kiss Before Dying” a true romantic thriller.

“When ‘Fatal Attraction’ came out,” he says, “Time magazine said ‘The Thriller Is Back.’ But just because there is a romance in this film and not that one doesn’t mean it is a romantic thriller like ‘Notorious’ (one of Dearden’s favorite films) or ‘Rear Window,’ although it has aspects of one. In a romantic thriller you want the couple to get together. In this (“Kiss”) you want very much for them not to be together.

“This is a nightmare situation of someone who falls in love with a killer. ‘Jagged Edge,’ earlier, was a sexual thriller, ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ a madman-on-the-loose thriller and ‘Sleeping With the Enemy’ is about wife battering. If none of those films had done big box office no one would be talking about the revival of the thriller. I don’t think people have ever ceased to want to be thrilled, frightened. It’s one of the emotions.”

Considering his slightly skewed look at life, it isn’t surprising that Dearden has recently written the screenplay for a remake (a term he dislikes) of “Lolita,” which will be directed by Adrian Lyne of “Fatal Attraction.” He will soon be off to Japan to direct “Buffalo Rome,” from his script based on Jay McInerney’s novel “Ransom.”

After that? “An adaptation of a book by Patricia Highsmith, who wrote ‘Strangers on a Train.’ It’s about a guy who wants to kill his wife and gets obsessed about a case in which another man got away with killing his. Meanwhile, the first guy’s wife commits suicide . . . here we go again.”