Fright Night (Vistar Films, Delphi TV Productions, Columbia Pictures, 1985)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I watched a couple of movies, including a 1966 science-fiction film called Destination Inner Space which I’d picked up a DVD of at a library sale . It turned out I’d already seen with Charles in January 2017 at one of the Vintage Sci-Fi screenings in Golden Hill (a regrettable casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic) amd posted at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2017/01/destination-inner-space-harold-goldman.html. Before that we watched a surprisingly good film from 1986, Fright Night, which first came to my attention recently during Herschel Walker’s bizarre U.S. Senate campaign in Georgia, during which he started babbling about it in one of his speeches and said the film had taught him that werewolves can kill vampires, so he decided he’d rather be a werewolf than a vampire. (Campaigning for Walker’s Democratic opponent, incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock, former President Barack Obama joked that he’d made that same decision … at age four.) I ordered Fright Night from Amazon.com – after learning from imdb.com that there were two versions of Fright Night, the original from 1985 (the one we watched) and a remake from 2011, and both generated sequelae, the 1985 Fright Night in 1988 with two of the same stars, William Ragsdale and Roddy McDowall, and the 2011 incarnation in 2013 – and I had mi misgivings.

I generally don’t like recent horror films because they’re too driven by bloodletting and gore – when I saw Wes Craven’s Scream I loved the first hour and a half of it, the parts that were done with real artistry and restraint, and then for the last half-hour he seemingly threw his hands up in the air and gave the modern-day horror audience what they want, which is a lot of blood splashed across the screen – and I wasn’t sure I should show Charles Fright Night because he has an even lower tolerance for on-screen gore than I do. Surprise! Fright Night turned out to be quite entertaining, as much a spool of horror movies as an example of one (despite the theatrical trailer, included as a bonus item in the DVD, which made it seem like the scariest film ever made). The central character is a high-school student named Charley Brewster (Willliam Ragsdale) who regularly watches a local TV horror show called Fright Night that shows horror movies and is hosted by a washed-up former horror star named Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall). It’s obvious from the character’s last name and rather supercilious manner that he’s meant as a spoof of Vincent Price (who was still alive women this film was made and it’s tempting to imagine him in the role, though McDowall is perfectly fine in it).

The action kicks off when the house next door to the one Charley shares with his mother Judy (Dorothy Fielding) – writer-director Tom Holland, a former actor making his directorial debut here, never bothers to explain what happened to Charley’s dad (whether his wife divorced him or he died) – is bought by a mysterious stranger named Jerry Dandridge (Chris Sarandon, top-billed) who may olr may not be a vampire. Charley becomes convinced that his new neighbor is one of the undead when his manservant Billy Cole (Jonathan Stark) is shown carrying a coffin into the house’s basement in the dead of night. Charley goes to his mother, his best friend Ed (Stephen Geoffreys) and his girlfriend Amy Peterson (Amanda Bearse), who after fighting him off for moonths was finally ready to yield to him sexually when he spied Billy moving that coffin and lost interest. All tell him incredulously that vampires don’t exist, and so does Detective Lennox (Art J. Evans) of the local police. So Charley seeks out Peter Vincent because he’s the only person he knows of who’s shown expertise in vampire hunting – even though Peter tries to explain to him that he’s not really a vampire-slayer, he just plays one on TV. Vincent at first joins the chorus of people trying to tell Charley that Jerry isn’t really a vampire, only to become convinced that he is one when he casts no reflection in Vincent’s pocket mirror.

The action snowballs from there, though with Holland keeping things light, as Jerry vampirizes both Amy and Ed (whom Charley, for some reason, has nicknamed “Evil,” a name Ed bitterly resents). Jerry’s bite turns Ed into a sort-of werewolf – or at least a large dog who goes after Charley – and when Ed pulls the stake out from his own body he goes into an odd set of physical changes that reminded me of Andy Serkis’s transformations in the Lord of the Rings movies and had me wondering, “What is Gollum doing here?” Peter tells Charley that the only way he can bring Amy back from the ranks of the undead is by killing Jerry, which proves harder than it looks as Billy Cole also turns out to be a vampire (albeit an odd one who can move about in daylight, which Jerry cannot) and Jerry seduces Amy and literally puts the bite on her. Charles joked that Holland inserted Amy as a character to make the story a bit less Gay than it otherwise would have been, though it’s still pretty Gay as it stands and the relationship between Jerry and Billy reminded me of that between Lord Darwell and his companion in the very first relatively modern-day vampire story, the fragment Lord Byron wrote in 1816 during the same vacation in Switzerland that gave Mary Shelley the idea for Frankenstein. The dramaturgy gets a bit muddled and hard to follow towards the end, but Holland’s light touch and relative restraint in the blood-and-gore department (despite a gruesome scene in which Billy literally melts into a puddle of green slime as he dies) keep it entertaining. Fright Night was a pleasant surprise and a quite enjoyable film, so thank you, Herschel Walker, for recommending it to us!