Fright Night (1985)

Once again in an otherwise pretty good movie I keep being struck by how vampires are so bad at being sneaky.  Although it’s never really established in the movie itself how long Jerry Dandridge (played by Chris Sarandon) has been a vampire he’s been at it long enough to apparently grow sloppy.  The movie starts with him and his thrall / assistant / undead helper Billy Cole (played by Jonathan Stark) openly lugging a coffin around the side of their new house right after moving in, which the star of the movie Charley Brewster (played by William Ragsdale) catches sight of and which creates his suspicions, further solidified by the vampire leaving the drapes open when he's killing his third victim in as many days so a peeping Charley can witness the attack.  He’s also pretty casual about the whole thing when he learns that Charley knows bout him, threatening him to stay quiet but choosing not to kill him, which eventually leads directly to his death.

I understand that this at least partly intentional on the movie’s part.  The metafictional beginnings that bubbled up in ‘Salem’s Lot’ are now fully incorporated into the plot and almost the point of this movie.  Here the two leads are a fan of horror movies on the one hand and a former horror movie star now reduced to hosting a tv horror movie show on the other.  They explicitly base their vampire-hunting activities on what they’ve learned from watching vampire movies, so the argument could be made that Jerry’s downfall is acting as if the old rules still apply while not taking into account the new media literacy.  This doesn’t really work because again he’s killing a person a day and leaving their beheaded corpses to be instantly found by the authorities.  The fact that there’s obviously a serial killer running around but the community and cops are acting like nothing is wrong allows for some comedic scenes but also strains the credibility of the entire affair.

I must admit that’s not really the point of the movie, and it’s not where its attention is.  This is a movie more concerned with having a good time than laying out a plausible scenario where a vampire moves to the suburbs and has a clear-cut long-term plan for survival.  After all we’re not following the vampire’s point of view, we’re following around Charley and his attempts to convince everyone around his that his neighbor’s a vampire and the shenanigans that follow, and on that level it works fairly well.

The plot is very straightforward and pretty appealing: in a twist on the ‘Rear Window’ formula a suburban kid becomes convinced his neighbor is a vampire and is quickly proven right.  He attempts to convince those around him to no avail, including the cops, his friend, his girlfriend, and a local former horror movie actor turned tv host.  The cops are of course no help and everyone else attempts to convince him that he’s crazy, leading to his friend being turned into a vampire, his girlfriend being kidnapped and about to be turned, and the host eventually being persuaded to team up with Charley to fight the vampire and eventually win.  It’s a movie that’s not taking itself too seriously and rather than getting bogged down in the implausibility of all of the vampire trivia it wants you to enjoy some fun fights, some good scenes, and the good guys winning in the end.

What actually interests me more than diagramming all of the ways that Jerry is a bad vampire is the swirling thematic undercurrents that are definitely there, as confirmed in a lot of interviews, but don’t really seem to congeal into any kind of coherent statement, or at least weren’t translated entirely successfully to the screen.  Like a lot of horror movies of the time period there are some attempts at exploring topics like homosexuality, social outcasts, sexual power dynamics, and the like that play very differently today than they did in 1985.  For example the ability to simply have characters be gay on screen has removed the need for a lot of subtext.

The most obvious way these themes are ‘explored’ is in the weird love triangle that develops between Charley, Jerry, and Charley’s girlfriend Amy Peterson (played by Amanda Bearse).  Using the standard-by-this-time shorthand of an old painting of the vampire’s that looks like the love interest, which is established so offhandedly that I’m pretty sure it’s intended as another in-joke, Jerry decides Amy must become his and goes about pursuing her.  This is contrasted by the opening in which Charley becomes distracted from the prospect of having sex with Amy for the first time by spotting the coffin-lugging outside of his window, which frustrates Amy and causes conflict between them for the rest of the movie.  This is all emphasized with the very debonair affect of Jerry, the seductive whammy he places on Amy (in a nightclub, this movie is not subtle), the overtly sexualized way he bites and begins to turn her, and the fact that while she’s turning into a full vampire the actress playing Amy switched to a gauzy, sexy attire as well as actually wearing a breast prosthetic in increase her bust size.  After the vampire is defeated the movie ends with Charley and Amy back in bed and Charley ignoring another suspicious sight outside of his window, presumably about to finally have the all-important sex.

The sexuality of vampires is not new and so contrasting that with a teenager’s fumbles around their first time isn’t a bad idea, and the theme runs fairly consistently through the narrative.  The vampire’s initial victims are all sex workers, which is sadly typical for serial killers and also allows the movie to have breasts on screen with minimal justification.  He’s a handsome white male who easily charms both Charley’s mom and Amy by simply being nice.  When Charley is locked in a room with the vampiric Amy she hisses at him, “What wrong?  Don’t you want me anymore?”  This is all done fairly well and is a throughline of the script.

The undertones about homosexuality aren’t really as clearcut and mostly boil down to equating two men living together and anyone being a social outcast as gay.  This isn’t anything new to the genre, ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge’ released that same year worked many of the same angles but rather more explicitly and in my opinion more successfully.  With this movie if I hadn’t read up on the background intentions of the filmmakers I never would have noticed.  The friend character, ‘Evil’ Ed (played by Stephen Geoffreys) is constantly mocking Charley and being a pretty bad friend.  Before he bites him Jerry tells Ed that her understands being an outcast, when he’s joking that he’s been bitten he threatens to give Charley a hickey, it’s all tenuous and easily dismissed but apparently the filmmakers meant for this subtext to be there, which considering that after being vampirized Ed tries to kill our heroes and dies a fairly agonizing death it’s not a great message.  It’s going to take a long time for all of the knots society twisted itself into to even begin to discuss or acknowledge the existence of something so banal as being gay to be fully unraveled and understood.  Hell, look at all of the fallout from season four of ‘Stranger Things’ and that’s only set in this time period.

Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of say about the character of Peter Vincent (played by Roddy McDowall), the washed-up actor turned actual vampire killer.  He has a tight little arc where he goes from being fired due to the rise in the popularity of slasher films and the subsequent drop in interest in the kinds of movies he starred in to gaining confidence by fighting and defeating a real vampire.  It’s a fun performance by Roddy McDowall, who I always enjoy on screen, and it’s a neat little glimpse of the days when local tv channels still produced their own content and had horror hosts of late-night movie marathons.  Even places like Iowa (where the movie is set) had their own little Elviras.  He’s a useful tool for the plot to justify having normal people know all about how to kill vampires and also a wink to audience who are also presumably familiar with all of the rules established by vampire movies.  We have the usual vampire powers of transformation, super-strength, general invulnerable, and the all-purpose vampire whammy.  Their weaknesses are the usual: garlic, crosses, stakes, sunlight, and once again the inability to enter a house unless they’ve been invited.  This was also mostly the case in ‘Salem’s Lot’ but it’s presented as explicitly a rule here, with parameters about who owns the house and everything, and I’d really be interested in a history of this concept in these stories because I remember it as a really key restriction on vampires and it’s only now starting to come up. 

‘Fright Night’ is pretty good and I can see it being a fairly important touchstone for horror fans who grew up during the 80’s.  It’s the first movie to explicitly grapple with the fact that between the spread of movies, television, and books it’s almost impossible to set a vampire movie during the present day without acknowledging the absolute deluge of vampire content out there so it goes the other way and embraces it without going so meta that it disappears up its own ass, something I’m a little worried about going forward.  The cast is likable, the story is solid, and any plot nitpicks or logical inconsistencies can be waved away by the fact that overall it’s a pretty good time.