An adaptation of the 1988 Stephen King short story of the same name, ‘The Night Flier’ was originally shown on HBO in November of 1997 and received a short theatrical release through New Line Cinema the following year. The timing was fortuitous as changes in communications technology and airline technology would have made the plot basically impossible even a handful of years later. This is a vampire movie, yes, but really it’s a newspaper story, and the way reporters function in this narrative would be rendered obsolete very soon.
One of the reasons there are so many Stephen King film and tv adaptations is that the man knows stories in his bones. He does have style, and subtext, and can juggle perspectives and unreliable narrators and all of that, he’s a bestseller for a reason, but he’s mastered the ability to have a beginning, middle, and end to his works and make readers care about what happens. It sounds way easier than it is, as you can tell from the way that no one else is really turning out as many successful books as he continues to. I don’t think anyone has ever described a book of his as "unfilmable." Ok, maybe The Stand and The Dark Tower series, but that doesn’t stop people from trying.
All that being said, the short story this is based on is not one of his classic works. It’s fine, it functions, but the sense I got from rereading it is that this was written by King at his most professional. He got an idea, worked it a little bit, cranked out a story, decided it was good enough to publish, and that’s about it. This is a work from a man with a job to do. That is not a criticism.
The script is a fairly faithful adaptation of the story while adding some scenes and characters to flesh it out into an actual movie. The direction is very flat and utilitarian but not distractingly so, it makes the movie feel like what it is: a low-budget cable tv adaptation. I’m not surprised that its brief theatrical run flopped. The script is similarly no-frills, mostly translating dialogue and scenes from the short story. It does disentangle the narrative of the original a little. The short story starts near the end of the narrative then flashes back to show how the character got to that point, the movie instead tells everything chronologically. It also introduces a secondary character to act a kind of foil to our protagonist, as well as changing the ending to be a little more moralistic.
The titular Night Flier is a vampire who’s been piloting a Cessna down the East coast of America, killing staff members at small rural airfields along the way.. After the third set of murders the trail is picked up by the tabloid paper Inside View and its head reporter Richard Dees, played by the great character actor Miguel Ferrer. A lot of the cult appeal of this movie remains that this was sadly one of the few times he was allowed to play the lead in something. The movie follows Dees as he follows up behind the killer, whom he dubs The Night Flier. He visits the scenes of the crimes, interviews victims, takes pictures, and pieces together the timeline. As he does so he slowly goes from thinking the killer just believes he’s a vampire to finally understanding that in fact he is a vampire. He’s briefly in competition with junior reporter Katherine Blair but manages to ditch her before finally catching up to the killer at an airport in Wilmington, North Carolina. He discovers the vampire has violently slaughtered everyone inside the airport before running into him inside a bathroom. The Night Flier forces him to expose all of his film before letting him go, but Dees follows him out and demands to see the vampire’s face. The Night Flier turns and shows him before forcing him to drink some of his blood, causing Dees to hallucinate that all of the airport victims have risen up as zombies. He attacks them with an axe and when the cops arrive they see him hacking apart the bodies and gun him down. Katherine shows up at the same time, watches the vampire fly away, then publishes a story blaming all of the murders on Dees.
I can see why they made the changes that they did. The investigation scenes were increased in scope to show just how much of a sleazy tabloid journalist Dees really was. In the story we can just read his internal monologue, in the movie we actually have to see him kick over a tombstone and smear his own blood on it in order to get the perfect picture to establish that. Katherine is there to have someone Dees can be mean to so we can be conflicted when he also seems to start to respect her and treat her better. She’s also there so the movie can end with a moral, which is the part of the adaptation that works the least, for me.
In the story Dees doesn’t push the vampire at the end, just stays frozen in place until he hears his plane fly away. He gets arrested because of course he does, he’s the only survivor, but he’s not gunned down and the murders aren’t pinned on him. It’s a much more ambiguous note to end on, leaving it unclear whether this experience is going to change Dees or if he’ll continue to be a terrible person. The movie decides that since Dees is a terrible person, a journalist doing terrible things to write terrible stories, those instincts make him push things too far and end up costing him his life. The movie (and to be fair the story was doing this do, just more skillfully) was asking that age old question: in the end, who is the real monster?
The vampire. The vampire is the monster. The one who just killed thirty people at an airport. Being an asshole isn’t the same thing.
A fundamental problem with both the movie and the story is that its basic premise doesn’t make a whole lot of sense if you think about it. It’s incredibly stupid for a vampire, even in 1988, to travel by such a rigorously tracked method of transportation as airplanes. Even if you fly to the rinky-dinkiest little airstrips someone’s going to do their job and follow up on a filed flight path and the jig is going to be up. The story and movie even admit this, pointing out that by the time of the third murder there’s been an FAA bulletin put out for the pilot and the airplane. This is used as a point of tension, that the vampire has mind whammy powers so strong that he can overcome any such resistance, but really this is not a long-term strategy. I am firmly convinced that the entire story came from a single idea King must have had when he was in an airport bathroom: standing at the sink, looking in the mirror, and seeing an invisible vampire pissing blood into a urinal behind you.
To be fair, that’s an amazing image. It’s in the story, it’s in the movie, and it’s what just about everyone remembers from both of them. I truly believe that everything else was built backwards from the climax in order to justify a vampire with a plane and someone watching them take a piss. If that’s your central idea and you want to make it work as much as possible this is just about the best story you can build around that moment. King is, after all, a professional.
A weird kind of footnote to the movie is how almost everyone in the movie never really did anything else, except of course for Miguel Ferrer. Dees’ editor was played Dan Monahan, who was Pee Wee in the ‘Porky’s’ movies and not much else, Katherine Blair was played by Julie Entwisle, who had a bit part in ‘In & Out’ that same year and that was it, and the writer and director, Jack O’Donnell and Mark Pavia, hadn’t done anything before and very, very little since. There was apparently some noise about a sequel based around the Katherine Blair character, basically driven by the fact that it’s become a minor cult movie, but nothing ever came of it.
This is a movie that deserves to be remembered as much as it is, as a lightly-edited staple of weekend evening showings on TNT and the USA network. Unfortunately, with the rise of wide-screen television a lot of movies like these have fallen out of circulation and as time goes on it’s going to be forgotten by more people. From what I can tell none of the current streaming services, not even Tubi, have it available, although multiple copies are available in full on Youtube and you can get a dvd for under $15 at the time of writing. It’s a perfectly fine adaptation of a perfectly serviceable Stephen King story and there’s nothing wrong with that.
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