You're so cool, Brewster

FRIGHT NIGHT

1985

Written and directed by Tom Holland

Spoilers: moderate

Fright Night, although successful enough even in its day, comes by the appellation "cult classic" honestly; not that this is the highest bar, but by now it's either the single most frequently-screened vampire movie of the 1980s, or the runner-up to The Lost Boys.  It was the directorial debut of its screenwriter, Tom Holland, who'd already achieved a certain level of reputation, especially on the basis of Psycho II, a movie that of course made plenty of money thanks to crassly exploiting its predecessor's legacy, but a screenplay which, in my estimation, hadn't gotten figured out before it went in front of a camera.  But then, Holland was as eager to direct Fright Night as he was because he'd already suffered other directors getting his screenplays wrong (he cites Scream For Help rather than Psycho II), so I guess we'd have to assume, if the oral history of the production didn't tell us directly, that Fright Night is indeed as pure a rendition of Holland's script as was possible.  That's swell, and speaks good things about Holland's competence, since it was exactly what all its principals were after, and not just Holland himself: it seems like everybody here—from Columbia Pictures, making a modest gamble on a first-time director, to Chris Sarandon, who'd rolled his eyes at doing this horror flick till he read it and found himself fascinated—really adored Holland's script.  So it's an odd thing to have to say, nigh-on forty years later, that Holland's script for Fright Night is the worst thing about it—it's a better-directed script than a well-written one, even counting that embarrassing moment where the vampire who can't be seen in mirrors is visible in an on-set mirror that occupies a third of the screen for upwards of forty frames of film—and, hell, the script is maybe even a trifle actually bad.

Perhaps it's simply that we're not speaking with precision: the idea of Fright Night is awfully good, and as Holland's movie gets that idea across without fumbling it, I've always been a little frustrated that the movie is never quite as good and coherent as I want it to be.  It is, of course, really more like "ideas," plural, which is where Holland starts tripping up: at absolute bottom, what Fright Night wants to be is a solid, even stolid, and hugely old-fashioned vampire film that simply happens to take place in 1980s suburbia—the movie sometimes gets called "a horror comedy," and I understand that from the outside it would have to look that way, but, quick, name the movie's best joke (this is very close to a trick question)—with, yes, the new obstacles that attempting to do battle with a vampire in 80s suburbia would bring, although even these are broadly similar to the old obstacles, in that people in Victorian England didn't generally believe in vampires either, and if you went around ranting about blood-sucking ghouls there you'd probably be institutionalized far more quickly than in Reagan's America.  The other big idea, however, is that it wants to be meta, because it would somewhat have to be—"what's a vampire?" is a plausible question in the 1890s in a way that in the 1980s it couldn't be—but beyond just being self-aware, it wants to pay loving tribute to all the old vampire flicks Holland grew up on, especially the Hammer Draculas, as well as to the broader cultural phenomenon of horror—the way horror cinema was used as grist for cheaply-made late-night TV, in particular—and hence the industrial wastebin that old horror movies (and their stars) got thrown into.  Reportedly, stumbling onto the latter idea is what galvanized Holland, Fright Night being said to have been written in three weeks, and that timeframe makes sense, given that its two ideas are not braided together so much as they bang into one another repeatedly before ever arriving at any cordial co-existence.

So: somewhere in Middle America, we have relatively ordinary high school senior Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale), whom we meet on the other side of a dissolve transition from a long tracking shot up the side of his house, during which we've listened to a stilted romantic scene from an old horror movie play out, presently to find Charley playing out one of his own with his girlfriend Amy (Amanda Bearse), in one of those young adult clinches where you make out and dry hump for like two hours because one or both of you are frightened of actual intercourse.  In this case, it's Amy's hang-up, Charley gets slightly mad, then apologizes, and she decides it's time after all, but Charley is immediately distracted—he knows the big Gothic fastness semi-unaccountably next door to his regular tract house has been recently sold, and out his window he spies men unloading furniture in the dark, except the "furniture" is, he's certain, a coffin.  Amy dries up in the about the time it took to describe that, starts another fight, storms off, and I kind of think we already have our screenplay's first problem, which is that it spends a hellaciously long time idling its female lead in "inscrutable bitch" mode, only barely letting her escape it before eradicating her personality completely.  It also signals another problem, but let's finish up here first.

The nocturnal sighting has piqued Charley's curiosity, and so he's surveilling the house and its visitors more intently than he might otherwise—noticing the gorgeous blonde woman (Heidi Sorenson) who enters it the next afternoon, only to show up on the evening news dead; poking around the neighboring property until one of the two men who live there, Billy Cole (Jonathan Stark), chases him off; being on hand to watch when the other man, Jerry Dandridge (Sarandon), brings home a gorgeous brunette (Irina Irvine, I think), and therefore primed to assume that the human-shaped garbage bag that exits from the property soon thereafter is, in fact, her corpse.  He's correct, obviously, because Jerry is nosferatu, the undead, and all that, updated for the 80s in style but in no other respect, and Jerry rapidly figures out that Charley knows (for one thing, Charley calls the cops and starts, well, ranting about blood-sucking ghouls).  Charley's single mom (Dorothy Fielding) is worse than ineffectual, insofar as she innocently invites the damn vampire into their house, an invitation Jerry would be happy to use to kill both of them though he's content, at first, with a violent, property damage-accruing warning; Amy is initially actively irritated with Charley, and their friend "Evil" Ed (Stephen Geoffreys) scoffs, though they soon both start to legitimately worry about his psychological state.  So does Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall)—late of many Hammer-adjacent movies as a Peter Cushing-like* vampire killer, but now the humble host of a certain Fright Night, Charley's favorite late-night local horror program—as he finds himself accosted by this teen maniac outside the studio the day he gets fired from his job, spouting off about vampires and asking Peter to help murder his neighbor.

So here's the thing: that all sounds like the stuff you'd want in your 80s, lightly-metafictional vampire movie, yet I'm not sure it entirely works together in this arrangement.  And even that's not really figuring in the film's most unbearably clumsy scene, where it brutishly lays out this film's vampiric ground rules and the guy who's so inescapably into horror movies that he sees vampires next door (and this is practically all we know about Charley!) runs right over to his pal's house in order to receive exposition regarding vampires, such as maybe didn't need to be exposited in the first place because this vampire is so classical anyway (get this—he's not apt to enjoy sunlight, garlic, crosses, holy water, or, like many of us, stakes of wood hammered through his torso).  Let's spot Fright Night that, since it's possible that in 1985, in the middle of modern cinema's biggest vampire drought, somebody did need this.

What nags at you is the constant sensation of the film trying to have its R-rated vampire horror cake and still eat its suburban 80s kid's adventure plotting too: Charley has to be sufficiently grown-up to pose a proper threat to the vampire (and, speaking extrinsically to the narrative, to be properly threatened himself, and indeed one of the things Holland does very well here is make it feel like not even the kids are safe); Charley also has to be sufficiently grown-up to have a more-or-less adult girlfriend for Jerry to sexually ensnare (as he dutifully does, in a "lost love" sort of way that weirdly prefigures Bram Stoker's Dracula); but Charley cannot be so grown-up as to avoid flailing around like a complete idiot.  And I realize I've sort of described "teenager," but that's not what he comes off as, but more like a contrived character who would never act the ways he does in the situations he's in, because he'd be too socially aware to show his hand like that—even a character, one half-wonders, who was originally conceived as significantly younger, given that he seems to have honest trouble grasping the distinction between Peter Vincent, the washed-up actor, and the character or characters whom Peter Vincent played in a series of schlocky and (from what we can discern) bad Hammer knock-offs.  (Though, again, credit to Holland for not descending into full-on parody with them except that one shot where McDowall is clearly holding a sharpened stake backwards, which is funny enough to justify it.  So I guess I know what my favorite joke is, in this by-and-large deadly-serious movie.)  And it's not like this is a proper slow burn, either, where Charley becomes increasingly convinced by circumstantial evidence, and increasingly unhinged; by no later than the thirty minute mark, though I'm pretty sure it's closer to twenty, Jerry is already trashing his house and threatening to feed on his mom. 

There's other problems that aren't even attached to that fundamental problem, though one does dovetail with the "at 107 minutes, somehow this 80s horror movie feels like it's too short" problem (it's more that it's paced a little oddly in order to fit its second big idea into its structure).  I alluded to it earlier, but this is a very glancingly-characterized ensemble, at least on the page, despite also being unrealistically small.  For instance, why is Ed "Evil"?  I don't know, but it sure does bother him!  Apparently, he's a complete social pariah.  (Charley only seems to have one friend, him, but Charley has a hot girlfriend? if anything, isn't Charley demonstrably the less cool one? then again, Amy appears to have exactly as many friends as Ed or Charley do.)  He's enough of a pariah, anyway, to get him to surrender to Jerry's offer of vampiric fellowship after the latter sees in him a kindred soul.  And then there's just general klutziness, like the aforementioned inorganic way that Peter gets roped into things, or the way, I swear, that the screenplay actually forgets that Jerry's goals with Amy aren't solely to torment Charley by supernaturally cuckolding him, or, arguably, the way this vampire movie for the 80s winds up, thanks to its reverence for vampiric media of a bygone age, somewhat replicating the turgid beats of what it honors, notably a lot of time spent thrusting crosses into vampires' faces during two whole scenes where the only goal is to get two guys up a flight of stairs, and each one nevertheless seems to last a reel.

I am bitching a lot about a movie that I mostly still love, and I did say "on the page" for a reason: this is a Goddamn great ensemble on the screen.  Not uniformly so, maybe; Ragsdale is doing strong work trying to resolve Charley's conceptual contradictions but he's powerless to make you forget them, and Bearse is excusably stymied by whatever Holland thought he was doing with her for half the movie, so that if I did have to identify a weakest link, I guess it'd be her.  But Bearse also probably has the single best acting moment in the film, just this remarkable little piece of visual storytelling, such that Holland was canny enough to capture but relies entirely on her.  It comes to pass that Jerry uses his vampiric hypnotism to steal Amy off the floor of the nightclub she and Charley have sought refuge in—reasonably, but wrongly, Charley believed that a public space would keep them safe—and Bearse plays this sequence brilliantly, threading Amy's own sexual frustrations, her only piece of characterization I think you could remotely call a throughline, into the way Jerry "seduces" her, without overcommitting to the prospect of sexual release, because it's still mind-rape; simultaneously, by means of nothing but the way she holds her body, she appears to age from a good simulation of "seventeen" to her actual age of twenty-six entirely inside a single shot.  Maybe I have problems with Ed, but not Geoffreys, channeling an unsettingly ratlike quality into his performance, and pushing every line read through this nose, so as to make it entirely plausible that he's a high school loser with a lot of resentment that he's tried to bury with irritating, counterproductive humor.  (Of course, he's the material for a spectacularly shitty vampire, too, but I mean that as a compliment, since it's in ways that Holland, unexpectedly enough, has every right to expect you to feel miserable about.)

So it is that my beloved Roddy McDowall maybe isn't even second-best (though I think he's easily the second-most enjoyable; his best acting moment's his reaction to Geoffreys's swan song), and I suppose there's the matter of his unnecessary aging makeup (McDowall could've been in Hammer movies himself, and I don't think aging up a fifty-seven year-old man to play Christopher Cushing or whatever was requisite).  Anyway, I do like McDowall a lot here, as a vainglorious actor who was barely ever famous, and has a fondness for his life's work but also a noticeable regretful contempt, suddenly confronted with the reality that even his dumbest movies were telling some version of the truth, something he's so incapable of processing that he seems startled to find that he's actually pursued a heroic course of action after all.  But man, there's Sarandon, and I doubt anybody has ever left Fright Night confused about who its best-in-show was—just oozing sultriness that becomes, so very naturally, omnidirectional sexual menace, and every other kind of menace, and extremely playful within the constraints of his stereotyped role (I love his business of showily, constantly, and ironically eating fruit) so that the hoariest components of his performance, or rather the hoariest components of Fright Night's vampiric mythology, like moaning at the sight of crosses, don't feel so creaky and old-fashioned as all that.

Holland, as director, is doing all he can to help: this is a very nicely-built horror movie, always getting the vibe right even when the screenplay resembles somebody who's never done so before trying to parallel park.  The idea at rock bottom animating Fright Night, of course, is that you never really know what happens behind your neighbors' walls—but what if you found out?  And it does that awfully well, assisted to no small degree by composer Brad Fiedel, whose neo-noirish electronica-and-guitars score isn't interested in pretending this is anything besides 1985, and Holland, Fiedel, and editor Kent Beyda pull some extraordinarily moody, fuguelike sequences (especially early on) out of the material of encroaching suburban paranoia.

I do think it's a shame that Holland lets go of ambiguity so soon—the movie's best scene might be in the first ten minutes, just us bouncing back and forth between Charley's voyeuristic POV of Jerry and the unnamed brunette and Charley's increasingly distraught reactions when he realizes they can somehow see him there in the dark, while Fiedel's Tangerine Dreamiest notes play and we (barely) perceive the detail of Jerry's talonlike nails—but he does have all that other stuff to get to; once Peter is on board, the movie scarcely makes another wrong step, and none of any serious nature (the scene of mock vampire testing, with everybody but Charley barely suppressing their laughter, which becomes a vampire discovery for poor Peter, might be the second-best scene).  In one respect Fright Night is a slow burn, with Holland having backloaded most of the best of Richard Edlund's special effects, and that pays off—the finale, I've groused, has a certain unappealingly cyclic quality (it feels like the movie just wants to live on that fucking staircase), but what might've been annoying in a 60s vampire flick is less so here, when folks are melting and boiling in fine "80s goop" style.  (Amy's and Ed's transformations are some real ambitious stuff; The Howling is their blatant touchstone, but they have a better story surrounding them.)  I suppose I somewhat wish that the element of dangerousness I mentioned had a more objective anchor (at least one too many people survive the ending of Fright Night, if not two, and frankly there's no other way to say it but Holland chickened out on Charley's mom).  But even then, I don't know if the movie desperately needed more consequentiality, when, awkwardly but successfully, it's spending its whole time astride two adjoining but very distinct genres—kid's adventure and horror—and never letting them do what they so easily could have, and cancel each other out.

Score: 7/10

*Is it alright if I point out that Vincent Price, meanwhile, is not associated in any strong way with vampire films?  (Last Man On Earth in particular is a science fictional rejection of the classical vampire, though Price does, at least, kill them.)  He was of course approached for the role of Peter Vincent, but turned it down, I suspect because it was more work than the aged horror luminary emeritus felt like doing.