Welcome to the Century of the Vampire, an ongoing weekly feature where Goonhammer managing editor Jonathan Bernhardt watches some piece of vampire media, probably a movie but maybe eventually television will get a spot in here too, and talks about it at some length in the context of both its own value as a piece of art and as a representation of the weird undead guys that dominate western pop culture who aren’t (usually) zombies.
Last week, Bernhardt reviewed the 1987 Joel Schumacher film The Lost Boys. Today, he looks at the 1985 Tom Holland film, Fright Night. This article will contain spoilers.
The Eighties vibe continues with Fright Night, which is no The Lost Boys, but what is? Still a pretty great film that in its own way gets what was cool about the generation of horror movies it had to riff on: The Hammer Horror catalogue and its like.
Honestly I went into this expecting to dislike the film. I’m not big on 80s Teen Whatever; most of the problems are boring and almost all of the men, from the teen boys on up, are contemptible (as are a bunch of the women, in fairness), and the main thing I thought I knew about Fright Night was that the conceit is that Dracula moved in next door to some knockoff Ferris Bueller type. The first fifteen minutes didn’t help much; lot of teenly intentionally-bad boyfriend and intentionally-annoying girlfriend stuff, an incredibly irritating sidekick character in Evil (Stephen Geoffreys) whose affect seems like nothing so much as a proto-Beavis in development for Mike Judge’s famous cartoon, and a single mom character whose three guiding character attributes are “horny,” “wants her son to do well in school,” and “has to go to work.” Dracula immediately moves in next door — we see the coffin being carried into the basement of the neighboring house as the comedic distraction from our hero Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale) trying to pressure his girlfriend Amy (Amanda Bearse) into sex — but there’s a lot of “Jeepers! A vampire’s moved in next door but nobody believes me!” stuff before we get to the meat of the film, or really anything interesting at all.
The real star of the film, and its saving grace through about the first 45 minutes of runtime, is the big man himself, Dra– uh, it’s the 1980s in Anytown, USA, so we’re going with “Jerry Dandrige” (Chris Sarandon, who you only know as the voice of Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas, if you know him at all). Sarandon looks like a slightly weirder, slightly less hot Eighties Oscar Isaac here, and especially in the first half of the film he plays Dandrige with the most evil step-dad energy we’ve encountered yet in a Dracula across our survey of vampire filmography. After Charley, still doing teen Rear Window shenanigans, sees him undressing a sex worker through the window of his bedroom before pulling the curtain — and then sees Dandrige and his live-in Renfield-esque zombie life partner Billy Cole (Jonathan Stark) carrying her body out back to their Jeep minutes later — he decides to go over and meet his new neighbors. He immediately hits on Charley’s mother and intimidates Charley into fleeing; there’s some more stuff in here where Charley tries to get the cops to investigate Dandrige and the like, which never comes up again.
That night, in probably the most interesting scene of the film, Dandrige does the most abusive step-dad sequence of things it is possible for Dracula to do in this situation: He vampires his way into the house; leers over Charley’s sleeping mom; breaks the handle on her bedroom door to lock her in; hides in Charley’s room until he comes upstairs; grabs the kid, smacks him around, chokes him out, taunts him about his mother while telling him he doesn’t want to be doing any of this but Charley’s making him do it; then when mom wakes up and starts hollering and trying to get out of her room, he tells Charley this is their little secret and runs away. As the perfect bow on this piece, after Charley calms his mother down and does in fact lie to her about what all that noise was, the kid sits down and the house landline rings. Charley tremulously picks it up. It is of course Dracula, calling to petulantly inform the kid that he destroyed his car offscreen in some grand mal step-dad temper tantrum and promising to do worse.
This is about where the step-dad stuff ends; within the next fifteen minutes the movie undergoes a wild shift in tone and focus with the introduction of Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowell), the C-list British actor slumming it as TV presenter of the local station’s Friday late night Fifties horror program Fright Night and our metafictional Van Helsing. You see, he plays the man who knows everything about vampires and has killed hundreds of them on TV, but he’s really a phony; then he learns vampires are actually real and everything he thought was fake was true, so he’s actually a hero! There’s an entire running theme here that goes from subtext to metatext to actual text by the end of the film, when Charley questions whether it’s still possible to save Amy and Vincent says out loud something to the effect of, “Well the vampire movies have been right about everything so far, let’s hope they’re right about this!” It straddles the line between homage to the great Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing films from the past and outright saying, “See? Your parents were wrong when they yelled at you for watching dumb movies on the couch all day! Movies can be important!” which is very on-brand for the Eighties in general.
Once Vincent is onboard, the movie shifts genres from teen comedy to outright horror adventure — the key pivot point in the film is when Vincent, Amy, Evil, and Charley storm into Dandrige’s house the next day to “prove” he’s a vampire and Vincent spends the whole time confidently showing Charley that actually Dandrige is obviously a human, until, in a repeat of the exact same spot from Dracula 1931, he realizes that the man casts no reflection in his pocket mirror. I don’t think the film would actually be better if we stuck with the “Dracula’s my new step-dad” vibes for the full runtime of the film, though this is one of those films that runs 100 minutes when it should run 85 to 90 — I do think the shift from the first half of the movie to the second is very jarring though. That scene with Vincent and the teens in Dandrige’s house is also where Dandrige transfers his leering attentions from Charley’s mom onto Amy, who we of course learn in a throwaway line when he and Billy are alone looks just like his old bride. Once that happens, the mom is out of the movie, the cops are out of the movie, all of Charley’s school stuff and teen sex comedy gimmicks are out of the movie, and we’re fully enmeshed in horror.
The third big part of the pivot, after Vincent learning vampires are in fact real and Dandrige obsessing over Amy as his Lucy/Mina/Ellen figure, is Evil going from goofy sidekick to Dandrige’s new vampire disciple, which immediately feels correct; the character was gravely out of place in the teen comedy section of the film, but now that we’re sneering at old men about immortality and wearing gross face makeup, this guy makes perfect sense. There’s a great sequence here where Dandrige pursues Charley and Amy through the darkened streets of Anytown, USA in his big white trenchcoat, face emotionless like Mr. X from Resident Evil 2. They eventually duck into a nightclub — we’re a few years past being able to call this a full-on discotheque, but that is the vibe — and after some comedy bits with the nightclub chef (?) chasing the kids through the dance floor, we get another big Dracula milestone in this retelling: The Seduction of Mina by the Vampire Dracula. Of course, since this is the Eighties in America, their names are Amy and Jerry Dandrige, and they look every inch the part.
There’s a very obvious shift from Amy having Girl signifiers in the first half of the film to Adult Woman signifiers in the second, but unlike most of the other shifts across that divide this comes off like an actual character arc rather than an abrupt change in tone. You are in fact supposed to look at the difference between the childish antics in the bedroom in the first scene of the film and the extended sexy grabass dance sequence between her and the vampire here and note a difference. This is the Eighties, so while it’s an enticing difference, it’s not a good difference; she is being corrupted and lured into a hell of evil vices by the lurid foreign creature of appetite of passion named, and I again must make this clear, Jerry Dandrige. While all this is happening, Charley is on the phone with Peter Vincent, who has just had a run-in with the newly-vampiric Evil at his apartment; when Charley gets off the phone and tries to fistfight Dracula, it goes about as well as you’d expect. Two bouncers step in to break it up and the vampire goes loud, killing both men, throwing them about the room, and starting a stampede for the exits. Drac, Renfield, and Drac’s new acolyte grab the girl in the ensuing confusion and now our Harker and Van Helsing stand-ins have to go into the belly of the beast to kill the vampire lord before sunrise.
This final act also takes a bit longer than it probably should, but it’s mostly forgivable because they’re just blowing through what’s left of their budget on all these prop and makeup effects. Renfield-Billy didn’t have to be some weird kind of gross zombie mummy full of green goo, but it looks really cool when he dies. Worth noting here, since it’s where the character leaves the film, that this is by far the healthiest Dracula/Renfield relationship that’s been covered in this space to date. It’s a low bar, and they’re still mostly doing their male bonding by, you know, killing sex workers and beating up kids, but they at least seem to enjoy each other’s company. There’s a running bit in here where Vincent stops being able to use the cross and crucifix to repel Dandrige because his faith has wavered (while Charley always can) but by the end he regains his faith; this is a fun subplot because it works on Evil in Vincent’s apartment, but then he loses his faith fastball after killing Evil really graphically, so he has to get it back. Always love this shoutout to Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot whenever it shows up. We’re told that they have to kill Dandrige by dawn or Amy will turn into a vampire forever, but the last fight stretches out until the sun is firmly up and shining in through the basement windows and she still turns back from a rather fantastically grotesque vampire bride into a human at the end, so. We’re not quite at John Carpenter’s The Thing-level practical effects but we’re up there, and the horrid “real” forms of the monsters are very fun. Completely cartoony and totally divorced from the more, and I use this term very relatively, realistic depiction of Jerry Dandrige’s monstrosity during the first half of the film before the turn; but very fun.
While most of the principals in this film went on to have long careers in acting, there were very few stars in this cast; as mentioned, Dandrige’s actor goes on mainly to be known as Jack Skellington, while if you’re struggling to place Charley’s actor because his face looks familiar, it’s probably because you know him as Gary from Justified. Amy became a supporting player on Married with Children then moved behind the camera into TV direction; Evil went into, uh, another part of the film industry. So on and so forth. But! Fright Night was remade in 2011, and the cast on that film — Colin Farrell as Jerry, David Tennant as Vincent, Jodi Collette as Charley’s mom, Imogen Poots as Amy, and the unfortunately departed Anton Yelchin as Charley — makes it worth checking out. So we’re taking a break from the Eighties next week to look at that.
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