Fright Night (1985) Starring Charley Brewster, Charley Brewster & Roddy McDowall Directed by Tom Holland Written by Tom Holland

Vampire movies are incredibly common these days. Just look at the horror shelves next time you hit up your local rentals (if you’re on this site, I can only assume that’s a regular stop for you); the vampire has become the seminal cinematic movie monster. Unfortunately, GREAT vampire movies are few and far between. It’s sad but true, for every Lost Boys out there (awesome), there are about a dozen Lost Boys 2 (blows goats). For every From Dusk Till Dawn (campy fun) there’s a hundred Dark Towns (cinematic abortion).

Lost amongst the sea of ruinous films is a little gem known as Fright Night. It was a modest vampire film in the mid-eighties that sought to bring the monster movie back into a market saturated with Leatherface knock-offs. The crew pulled it off on a $9 million budget, making a great looking film that somehow managed to get everything right, and brought vampires back to the screen in a big way.

The story centers on Charlie (William Ragsdale), a high school kid living with his single mom. He’s got a cute girlfriend, Amy, (Amanda Bearse of Married with Children fame), an obnoxious best friend, Evil (porn star Stephen Geoffreys) and a love of old horror movies. Unfortunately for Charlie, he also has a tendency towards paranoia, applying horror movie logic to everyday situations. His suspicions inspire him to start spying on his new neighbor, Jerry Dandridge (Chris Sarandon), and his many female guests. Its one night while using his binoculars to ogle one of Jerry’s late night romps that Charlie unwittingly witnesses a prelude to murder; slowly he begins to realize that his neighbor is a vampire!

What follows is a modernization of the fable The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Charlie tries to get his mother, his friends, even the cops to look into Jerry’s nocturnal activities, only to be repelled by a solid alibi and a very charismatic vampire’s helper (homunculus!). Soon he’s a laughing stock at home and at school, the only witness to a grisly string of murders, stricken dumb by his own over-active imagination. Charlie’s investigations only serve to piss the vampire off, and soon he realized he’s put not only himself, but also his disbelieving friends and family, in mortal danger.

Finally, Charlie turns to his hero for help: Peter Vincent, Vampire Hunter. Enter Roddy McDowall, here to save the day (and steal the show). Vincent is a horror movie star, long out of work and short on cash. For a price, he agrees to humor the boy’s request to do a ‘vampire test’ on Jerry and his home. But when his tests reveal that Jerry has no reflection, what was supposed to be Vincent’s supreme con act does nothing more than draw him into the otherworldly struggle. Revealed, the vampire accelerates his plans, biting the necks of Charlie’s closest friends, turning them into undead minions, and unleashing them upon the boy and would-be vampire hunter.

The story, and many elements of Fright Night, seem pretty commonplace now, but in 1984 they were completely unheard of. Vampires had taken a backseat after the 70’s, and even in their previous prevalence, they had never been placed in a modern setting. A few of the Hammer films had put them in a ‘modern’ London, but those were always filled with anachronisms, and the Draculas of those days was always trapped in the Victorian shadow of Bela Lugosi’s Count.

By contrast, Fright Night brought old legends into today’s society, a time where there were no Van Helsings, no one experienced in vampire lore coming to save the day. Chris Sarandon’s vampire isn’t some hokey Transylvanian outcast; he’s a smooth operator that has assimilated into society, and his unholy powers are next to impossible to prove to a world free of superstitions. Jerry’s power is overwhelming to the characters, as it should be to the inexperienced vampire slayers; his only weakness is the accursed sun.

The film really works because of the way it handles the ambivalence of Charlie’s supporting cast. It treats the source material with plenty of respect, Jerry the Vampire is always filmed at an upwards angle to show reverence to his undead stature, there’s a mystery, majesty, and power about the character that shines through, even from under his big 80’s sweaters. Yet, the reactions to Charlie’s cries for help are totally natural (if totally over-acted), and provide the comic relief that the movie needs. You can completely picture Charlie as that nut-job ‘black magician’ or conspiracy theorist kid from your high school (and if was you, my apologies, but you creep people out.) It lets the audience get a little tongue in cheek laugh before delivering on the scares. The exact mental process of the audience is something like “Ha ha. Vampires, yeah right. But, holy shit, what if?”

Not to say the film doesn’t get campy; Amanda Bearse and Stephen Geoffreys weren’t quite old enough to have really nailed down their acting yet (though Stephen’s energy is amazing, you’ll be quoting Evil Ed after the film is done), and while they’re fun characters, you really can’t take either one seriously. What makes the film is the addition of Roddy McDowall. Peter Vincent pays homage to Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing character from Hammer’s long line of Dracula films (you even get a great recreation of Vincent staking a vampire, filmed in the Hammer style). He’s represents Cushing had he never went on to be Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars, and had been lost to obscurity; he’s trapped doing segues to his old movies on a local TV station to turn a quick buck.

Vincent works on several levels, adding his own skepticism to the cast, and then turning on a dime, playing the classic, stereotypical vampire hunter to try and con Charlie for his cash. Its Peter Vincent, more than anyone else, who pulls the audience into the film, not only because of his ability to turn the worst elements of cheesy vampire movies into strengths in this film, but because the audience really roots for him when he finally turns from actor into a real vampire hunter. McDowall clearly conveys the triumph Vincent feels when he realizes that he’s not just an empty shell of the man he portrayed in his films, but has the heart of an action hero after all.

In fact, it’s the relationship between Vincent and Charlie that even makes Charlie and tolerable character. It turns him from a paranoid, naïve brat into a kid looking to vindicate his admiration for his greatest hero, and finding it in an hour of need.

Ok, ok, I’m getting pretty deep here, and you’re just going to watch it for the awesome vampire action, and maybe to have a giggle at what 80’s nightclubs used to look like. Enjoy it for that, enjoy it for the sweet-ass special effects (for the 80’s. Good make-up and rubber monsters) from Richard Edlund and Co. (the team that brought you Ghost Busters), and enjoy it as a film that did something fresh with Vampires without having to arm them with guns or change anything from the Dracula mythology.

Fright Night is a labor of love, a horror film made solely to show how much fun you could have with horror, and how much room the genre had to grow. There are a lot of levels you can enjoy this one on. If for nothing other than the fact that it established Lost Boys and almost every other vampire film that followed it, this one’s worth watching.