Taking a cue from such films as "The Frighteners" and "Gremlins," director Alexandre Aja's "Piranha 3-D" is mixing scares and laughs on a big-budget scale.

This shift to include humor marks a new direction for Aja, whose previously horror efforts -- "Haute Tension," "The Hills Have Eyes" and "Mirrors" -- maintained unmerciful dispositions.

However, Aja promises plenty of carnage for his reboot of Joe Dante's 1978 film. A beach massacre he filmed included 500 extras.

"During the whole process the idea was to do a movie like 'spring break under attack,' so it was the whole idea," Aja said during an interview with ShockTillYouDrop.com. "Of course any studio would have tried to 'Less is more. We care about the characters, we don't care about spring break,' because it was a huge scene, nine days of shooting. It was really big. I don't know how many hours, but I would guess around 25 or 30 hours of dailies, five cameras.

"It was, in every scale, really huge. The special effects guy told me [around] 5,000 gallons of blood. I think it's a little bit over because it's cutting the blood with the water, but it's pretty sick. Lake Havasu was completely red for a few days after. All of that together, it was the only reason why I wanted to make this movie. I wanted to have that huge scene. [I wanted to have] a movie that starts like a spring break where you can have some fantasy on it and then turns into a big nightmare."

But along with the nightmare Aja promises a few chuckles and thrills.

"It's completely different from anything else that I've ever done before and it's very, very dark funny," he explained. "It's scary as well. We are much more on the 'The Frighteners,' 'Braindead,' 'Gremlins' side than like the other movies before. We are completely throwing popcorn. We are going for the rollercoaster ride. We are here to spend an hour and half in the most insane world that we can imagine.

"The movie was funny even while writing. The first script I read five years ago was already that idea of 'spring break under attack' and it was already something very iconoclastic with a kind of subtext about American culture. Like spring break being the incarnation of the American way of living in excess and the piranha being the unexpected dilemma, the uninvited guest that's going to just crash the party. It's so in the vain of all those guilty pleasure movies that we had in the '80s. Just the rewriting of the script was following in that direction. I think even directing the movie and shooting everyday those scenes together is exactly what we achieve. We achieve to create that kind of movie that you would have died to have seen when you were 12, 13, 14, 15, 16... monotonous."

See more of Aja's interview at ShockTillYouDrop.com.

The film stars Elisabeth Shue, Christopher Lloyd, Ving Rhames, Jessica Szohr, Steven McQueen, Adam Scott, Jerry O'Connell and a "Jaws" inspired cameo by Richard Dreyfuss.

Dimension Films opens "Piranha 3-D" in theaters March 19, 2010.