It’ll Be the Night of Your Life: Celebrating 40 Years of ‘Fright Night’
Fright Night is one of my favorite films of all time. It is seen as part of a trifecta of incredible 1980s vampire movies alongside The Lost Boys and Near Dark, both released in 1987. Fright Night is the first of them, released in 1985, and it is also, in my opinion, the best. Honestly, though, aside from being about vampires it doesn’t have that much in common with the other two. Both The Lost Boys and Near Dark center on a young man, seeking independence, wanting to strike out on his own, who meets a mysterious girl and winds up falling in with her undead kin. Fright Night doesn’t do that. It is still just as much about teenage anxiety and insecurity, but rather than lure its protagonist into the world of the vampire, it takes a more traditional approach, with a teenage hero attempting to stop the spread of evil. That’s really the film’s entire hook. It’s about taking the classic structure and traditions of a well-known mythology and updating them for the modern 1980s. Fright Night is truly about vampires in a way that the other two aren’t. Even more than that, it’s about vampire movies.
This is clear from the opening moments, when our teenage hero Charley Brewster is attempting to round home base with his girlfriend Amy while infrequently glancing up at Fright Night, a local late-night TV program hosted by has-been B-Movie actor Peter Vincent that shows older, easy-to-license horror films, many of which Vincent starred in. Charley sees men carrying a coffin through a cemetery on the TV screen, and glancing out the window, he sees two men carry a coffin into the house next door. This moment sets up the plot of Fright Night, which at its core is very simply about a boy trying to convince anyone of the fact that a vampire has moved in next door to him, but it also completely sets up the tone and style. In that regard, it is very, very similar to the opening scene of Scream, which not only featured the tense and spectacular opening kill, but the trivia game that let the audience know exactly what the movie’s relationship with its own genre would be.
Fright Night is similar to Scream in several ways. The meta commentary on the genre is obvious, but it’s the specific approach that really makes this film feel like a precursor to Wes Craven’s ’90s classic. After all, Fright Night wasn’t the first horror comedy to poke fun at the genre, far from. Both Fright Night and Scream are ultimately earnest in their approach, though. In both, the humor is completely situational, resulting from the characters and their interactions with one another, rather than relying on any specific jokes or gags. Fright Night is as much a straightforward vampire film as Scream is a slasher, it’s just that both happen to exist in a world where the characters are familiar with the genre. Charley’s a fan, and that only makes things look worse for him. In Tod Browning’s Dracula, Van Helsing remarks that, “the strength of the vampire is that no one will believe in him.” That goes doubly true for a time when vampires have risen to such prominence in pop culture.
Chris Sarandon’s Jerry Dandridge is a perfect update on the cinematic Dracula archetype (particularly the version of the Count that developed on stage, passed down from Bela Lugosi to Frank Langella) for 1980s suburbia. He doesn’t look like a vampire. He doesn’t act like a vampire. He’s effortlessly charming. Perhaps the biggest update to the trope in the near-century since Dracula had been written, at the time, Dandridge is a fitting parallel to the modern serial killer, something which had caused both a panic and a rekindled interest in true crime around that time. He is the classic “charming neighbor whom nobody would suspect.” The dynamic between protagonist and antagonist almost never falls back on calling out horror movie tropes, and that’s one of the best things writer/director Tom Holland achieved with this film. The cat-and-mouse game between Jerry and Charley is positively riveting.
While the basic plot is a mix of old and new, a celebration and deconstruction of classic vampire films, the core of Fright Night is literally ancient. This is, in essence, simply an update on “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” In this case, it’s the boy who cried vampire. But it’s a story that’s been around for centuries, and Holland smartly applies it to the modern American teenager, which completely reframes and re-contextualizes that narrative. There’s a nobility to this concept in Fright Night. Charley will do anything to prove that Dandridge is a vampire, partly to save his own life, partly to prove that he’s not insane, but mostly to keep those closest to him safe, because he knows they’re in danger as long as Dandridge is out there. This innate sense of bravery cannot be ignored. Charley is one of the only protagonists in horror history to be given an out, as shortly after Dandridge knows Charley knows, he offers Charley the option of turning a blind eye, saying nothing, and he’ll let Charley live. From that moment on, Charley has proven that his own life is not enough to get him to walk away and ignore the problem, and every single decision he makes from that point through to the end of the film is about protecting others.
Yet, at the same time, there’s an underlying theme of insecurity that impacts every single character. Charley’s on the cusp of “becoming a man” in the ’80s movie terminology of losing his virginity. He’s hormonal and anxious, and his love of horror and monsters could be seen as kind of middle school interests, young for his age. Standing in his way, the perfect foil, the most handsome and confident man imaginable. A suave and older man who could easily sweep Charley’s girlfriend, Amy, off her feet — and plans to. Probing even deeper into the themes of insecurity is this thread of sexuality, as there’s an attraction to Dandridge on Charley’s part as well.
Amy is in very much the same boat, a modernization of the classic heroines of nineteenth century vampire literature, a repressed woman for whom becoming a vampire marks a full transformation into a sexual being, except in this case, Amy is so explicitly a willing participant in that transformation. She is already going back and forth in the opening scene about whether or not she is ready for sex. When Dandridge bites her, it’s an obvious love scene, and the only real problem with it is that she is in high school and he is much older, immortal or not. But the scene at least goes out of its way to depict her, as much as it can under the circumstances, as a willing participant.
Becoming a vampire also brings confidence to the character of Evil Ed, mostly by letting him be unrestrained. He’s only more of exactly the same person he was before, simply without shame. Evil Ed is Charley’s best friend and a total outsider. He gushes over horror films in a different way from Charley, and in a way to which I know many fans can relate. Evil Ed and Charley love the same things, but Charley loves them in a way that isn’t alienating, that can allow him to have other friends, and a social life, and Evil doesn’t have that. He’s a flamboyant outsider, never unable to be anything other than the maximum of who he is, and the most overt metaphor for sexuality in the entire movie, because of that. To the point, in fact, that a recent novelization by Holland himself explicitly stated that the character is gay. Dandridge comes to Evil Ed in a full seduction scene, taking him by the hand, folding him into his billowing coat, and promising Ed that he will live a life taking pride in his difference, free from persecution, which is something that Ed cannot resist.
But the biggest representation of insecurity in the entire film lies in Charley’s movie hero Peter Vincent. Once Charley approaches Peter about his vampire problem and the horror host enters the film as more than just a face on the TV screen in Charley’s bedroom, we are treated to Roddy McDowall giving what might genuinely be my favorite performance in a horror movie. Peter Vincent is the Cowardly Lion of the horror genre. He is, as he’s so fond of saying, the “Great Vampire Killer” of the movies. But the career he frequently boasts about is one that he no longer has. He’s an old man acting as a horror host, playing his old hits on a local TV station. And he can’t even hold onto that. He’s losing both his job and his apartment, and the face of the confident actor he puts on for Charley and his friends is nothing more than a total ruse. That’s a huge key to his character.
The vampire killer Charley believes him to be is not half as much of a well-constructed lie as the actor portraying him. As Peter points out, “Peter Vincent” isn’t even his real name. But there’s something he brought to the screen in those old movies resonates with Charley, and Amy, and Ed, and they all see it even if he can’t. That’s the brilliance of Peter’s eventual hero turn, and his ability to stand up and fight even though he is terrified. It’s not just that Peter isn’t the character he plays in the movies. It’s the fact that he is the only one who believes he cannot be that. It’s a miracle to watch how well that arc unfolds over the course of the third act. It would be one thing, a much less interesting thing, if Peter simply gained confidence and bravery through dealing with real-life vampires. But that’s not what happens. He never stops being a scaredy cat, not really, but he gets the job done despite that, and that is the true mark of a hero.
There are so many layers to Fright Night. It’s a meal of a movie, a smart genre satire with well-constructed characters, but at the same time, it is first and foremost a roller-coaster. It’s just a marvelous carnival dark ride of ghoulish practical effects. The combination of those things make it one of the absolute best horror movies of the entire decade.
Even if you haven’t seen the Hammer movies it draws inspiration from, and I’m sure many haven’t, it works on its own, just like Scream. You don’t have to do the homework before going in, because as the tagline promises, if you simply love being scared, it will be the night of your life.
