Review: Fright Night (1985)

Fright Night (1985)

Rated R

Score: 4 out of 5

When I first sat down to watch Fright Night, the classic 1985 vampire horror-comedy, courtesy of a screening at the MonstahXpo in Nashua, New Hampshire (complete with four of the film's stars in attendance for a Q&A session afterwards), my initial thought in the first thirty minutes was trepidation. The film felt less comedic than simply goofy in a bad way, filled with unlikable characters acting in unrealistic ways that broke my suspension of disbelief, and I feared that the rest of its runtime would be a heartbreaker, a classic by reputation that didn't hold up watching it again nearly forty years after it came out. Imagine my surprise and relief, then, when the film got good in a way that elevated its unsteady first act in hindsight, taking what looked at first like a dumb, cheesy '80s relic and turning it into a very fun battle between good and evil that recognizes how ridiculous its protagonist's assertion -- that his next-door neighbor is a vampire and a serial killer -- might sound to somebody who's hearing it for the first time, and made this a central component of its dramatic tension. It's a film that would make a great companion to The Lost Boys in a double feature, a meta sendup of classic vampire movies that's nonetheless rooted in a clear affection for the genre, and a film I'd happily recommend to both horror fans and '80s retro-heads.

Our protagonist Charley Brewster is a teenage boy living in the suburbs who's just discovered two horrifying things about his new next-door neighbor, the handsome and charming Jerry Dandridge. First, he's a serial killer who's responsible for the dead homeless people and sex workers that have suddenly started turning up in the neighborhood. Second, he's a vampire who's killing to sate his bloodlust. Charley's best friend "Evil" Ed and his girlfriend Amy both think he's crazy, such that, when he tries to go to the local late-night horror host Peter Vincent for help in killing a vampire, Ed and Amy meet up with Peter in order to stage an intervention to prevent Charley from acting on his delusions and doing something horrible. Unfortunately, in the course of the intervention, Peter soon realizes that Charley wasn't crazy, but that there really is a vampire stalking the neighborhood, and that all of them are now in danger.

While Charley is the film's protagonist and viewpoint character, the most interesting character, and the one who probably gets the biggest arc, is Peter Vincent. A former horror movie actor based on the likes of his namesakes Peter Cushing and Vincent Price, he's a guy whose best days are far behind him, hosting a TV show in an anonymous California suburb showing his old movies for an audience that, barring weirdos like Charley and Ed, has largely moved on from his style of horror in favor of slasher movies. Peter is washed up and stuck in the past, as seen when he desperately and comically tries to fluff his own ego when Ed and Amy first meet him only for them, and the audience, to see right through it after Amy offers him $500 for his help. Fundamentally, this movie is a love letter to classic horror and the people who made it, with Peter's story revolving around him realizing that the movies he made, which he's grown quietly contemptuous of for how they grew to define his career and public image, did in fact change people's lives for the better and, in the case of Charley and his friends, literally save their lives. Roddy McDowall was great in the part, bringing a bitter cynicism to Peter that eventually turns to terror once he realizes that the monsters of his movies are in fact very real and very lethal.

Chris Sarandon, meanwhile, made for a great vampire as Jerry Dandridge, somebody who looks like a modern gentleman but is otherwise a vampire fully in the classic Universal/Hammer mold, hewing closely to the old rules and a modernized version of Bela Lugosi's charismatic portrayal. He may not have the accent or the cape, but whether he's introducing himself to Charley's mother or seducing Amy on the dance floor of a nightclub, I could imagine myself being superficially charmed in his presence and failing to recognize how dangerous he is, in the same manner that London high society was by Count Dracula. Charley is the only one who sees through his façade, and while I initially felt that William Ragsdale's performance made him come across as a jerk who was prone to flights of fancy, it turned out that this was exactly how the film wanted me to see him. He's pure wish fulfillment for the film's teenage target audience, a boy who gets to kill a vampire and ultimately save his beautiful girlfriend from the clutches of darkness, and Ragsdale pairs that with a quintessential "'80s teen movie protagonist" energy to great effect. Amanda Bearse, too, made Amy a great modern take on Mina Harker or Lucy Westenra, the cute girl next door who falls into Jerry's clutches and becomes a sex bomb along the way, while Stephen Geoffreys made Evil Ed such an annoying jackass in the best way (and made his ultimate fate feel well-deserved).

Behind the camera, Tom Holland (no relation to the Spider-Man actor) did great work with both the horror and the comedy, making a film that frequently pokes fun at the conventions of vampire movies but never forgets that the villain is a dangerous predator beneath his mask of humanity. When Jerry confronts Charley in his bedroom early in the film, it is a vicious beatdown between the physicality of the action and the great, bone-chilling makeup for Jerry's full-blown vampire form (which the poster offers a taste of). The dance sequence in the nightclub was a highlight that made me feel how seductive Jerry was supposed to be, and the climax was filled with great special effects set pieces as Charley and Peter fought Jerry and his servant Billy all over Jerry's palatial house. The jokes, too, frequently landed, especially once the film found its footing. Not only does the film mine a lot of humor out of exploring and exploiting the "rules" of vampires, it also has a lot of fun jokes at Peter's expense, whether it's with him trying and failing to hide how far his star has fallen in front of Ed and Amy or him running for dear life the first time he goes up against Jerry. The teen comedy and drama of the first act, on the other hand, was undoubtedly its weakest point, feeling very ho-hum and serving little purpose except to establish the main characters while also setting up potential relationship drama between Charley and Amy that it never built upon after. An interesting idea would've been to depict Amy's frustration with Charley playing hot-and-cold with her as making her more susceptible to Jerry's seduction, which would not only force Charley to confront how he'd been a pretty bad boyfriend to Amy, but also deepen Jerry's dark aura by forcing Charley to face him as not just a predator, but also a romantic rival. The teen stuff felt like an afterthought with the way it played out, and it was fortunate that the film dropped it almost entirely around the start of act two.

The Bottom Line

While not without its flaws, Fright Night still holds up as a great horror-comedy and vampire movie, with a great cast and a script that has a lot of fun with the genre while still being scary. If you're into vampires or the '80s, give it a go.