Movie Review: Fright Night (1985)

Fright Night (1985)

What Really Goes on Next Door?

Directed By: Tom Holland
Starring: Chris Sarandon, William Ragsdale, Amanda Bearse, & Roddy McDowall
MPAA Rating: “R”

Made in the infamous eighties, Fright Night was a departure from the concrete structure of typical teen horror fare. Gone are the random nude teenagers and the killer in a rubber Halloween mask. In their places are one curious teenaged boy, a television personality with an affinity for the supernatural, and a brutal vampire that lives next door. A clever and humorous blend of classic horror efforts and eighties shockers, Fright Night is what would have happened had Bela Lugosi wandered onto the set of a slasher flick and started offing teenagers. This movie, made in a time of cheap teen screams that were virtually all the same thing, dares to be something different. Roddy McDowall’s character, a cinematic horror legend (now opting to host the cheesy TV program, "Fright Night") named Peter Vincent, remarks smugly, “Apparently your generation doesn't want to see vampire killers anymore, nor vampires either. All they want to see is slashers running around in ski masks, hacking up young virgins.”

Fright Night begins by introducing Charley Brewster (Ragsdale), an average high school kid who enjoys horror movies and is a big fan of Mr. Peter Vincent, and his quirky, but cute girlfriend, Amy (Bearse). As is the case with many teenagers in these kinds of movies, sex is the primary focus of their minds. Should they? Shouldn’t they? Just as Amy finally decides that she is ready for sex, however, Charley is distracted by two shadowy figures moving a coffin into the house next door. Soon after, two young women are found decapitated and Charley recognizes one of them as a girl who had recently visited his new next door neighbor. He soon begins to suspect that Jerry Dandrige (Sarandon), the suave and charming man who lives just feet away from his bedroom, may be a blood-sucking vampire, and so he turns to Peter Vincent, the horror icon and self-professed vampire killer, for help.

Fright Night is not the scariest horror film to have come out of the eighties, but one might say that it was never supposed to be. It was a horror-comedy before they were the latest trend. It exists fully in the world of the eighties, when audiences had given up belief in vampires and had moved on to the much-beloved slashers. The vampires living next door are perhaps the boldest cinema has ever seen. Rather than living in a secluded castle and feasting on broken-down motorists, Dandrige lives in a friendly neighborhood in a common house (with the exception of the inexplicable swirling mist that constantly enshrouds it). No one, except for the young Charley, seems to mind the screams of desperate girls as they are killed or the fact that he bites them in front of open windows. After all, vampires don’t really exist...well, at least not in typical eighties horror.

Fright Night does not have much of an impact on the genre as a whole, but it was once a stark reminder that there are other things in the realm of terror than obviously-disguised madmen with knives. It seems to understand its own absurdities, never challenging them, but acknowledging them. When discussing the rules of vampires, Peter observes that his television show had been right about everything else so it would naturally work for something new as well. I particularly would not run into a vampire’s lair based on some grainy late-night creature feature, but the characters in Fright Night would and it seems to make sense for them. Though it does occasionally delve into the tired genre clichés (i.e. the character that widely professes his disbelief in vampires marches off into the night and...well, you know) and the ending is excruciatingly long, Fright Night is an effective horror film, one that mixes sinister creature effects with dark humor for entertaining results.