The classic 1980s horror
comedy Fright Night, recently released in the UK on an extras-stuffed
4K digital restoration Blu-ray by Eureka Entertainment, was
actor-turned-screenwriter (and future Child’s Play director) Tom Holland’s
striking debut behind the camera. Appearing mid-decade, at a time when the
traditional monster-centred horror movies of the 1930s Universal cycle and
their full-colour British Hammer reformulations of the late ‘50s and 1960s, had been
fully integrated into cultural life as quaint cliques from the past, with modern audiences
now acclimatised to the era of Slasher movies, Holland came up with a
concept that minted a cult classic for those of us of a slightly younger generation,
who had come of age discovering these older films on TV in the 1970s. For Fright
Night gave vent to a nostalgic reverence for tropes and themes derived
from the classic Hammer Horror Pictures and their AIP cousins, at the very
moment when these movies were being marginalised by a dismissive popular
culture which had already relegated them to airtime-filling, end-of-the-week
TV horror marathons, where they were a source of cheap programming for
independent local channels. However, in the States, these Friday night horror
jamborees also furnished a lot of old movies with a second home, where they
could be discovered afresh by a whole new audience of insomniac children and partied
out adolescents. Similar late-night screenings were also available to those of
us who resided in the UK -- where such films were a staple, for instance, of
the BBC’s fondly remembered Saturday night Horror double-bill seasons.
Part of the reason Fright
Night has remained such a beloved icon of ‘80s cinema ever since lies in
the appeal this film has for those of us who now realise that it actually provides
us with a double-dose of nostalgia: for if you were just entering into the adolescent
stage of life during the ‘80s, having loved the classics Holland was paying
tribute to from seeing them on TV at a formative age of your childhood back in
the 1970s, then you will doubtless also now be looking back on the 1980s and associating the styles, the music, the imagery, the
aesthetics and the physical effects-orientated horror cinema of the decade with
the same moment of adolescent awakening that inspired Holland to create this charming,
funny (and often still scary) tribute to the Vincent Price and Peter Cushing
films of his own early experience. Realising those older movies must have
assumed a similar totemic status in Holland’s adolescent development as Fright
Night came to have in many of ours, then, lends the film a whole extra level
of resonance, and galvanises an even acuter awareness of its thematic
cleverness.
Some other major reasons why the
film still commands such adoration and respect have to do with its intelligent choice
of casting, and with Holland’s utilisation of the talent he employed in helping
to re-contextualise some of the generic ideas predominating in past adoptions
of the figure of the vampire, along with all its particular usages and meanings in classic
horror cinema. The traditional cultural motifs that relate to the Vampire
mythos are successfully packaged within an utterly commercial, contemporary Hollywood
coming-of-age comedy drama with maximum mainstream appeal, where they now
function as an updated 1980s spin on those same socio-political and sexual subtexts
which had always previously historically provided the vampire with its latent
purpose in literature and film -- by extension also becoming a self-reflexive meta commentary on these motifs at the
same time. The story has a deceptively simple construction that initially riffs
off an idea inspired by Hitchcock’s Rear Window, but which is threaded through
with reflexive attitudes that recognise the tension existing in the horror genre’s
ability to, on the one hand celebrate
the Outsider, and provide succour for those who do not relate so easily to mainstream
culture; whilst, at the same time, it ruthlessly exploits a heteronormative
society’s inherent fear of the Other so
as to create the mainstream appeal for itself that is always necessary to allow
any film to become a major hit.
The opening scene sets in
motion a meticulously crafted interplay of elements that can be seen to be the
key to understanding much of what the rest of the film is up to, setting up all
the references and thematic pointers that are to be challenged, transformed or
re-imagined throughout the rest of the picture, as Holland sets about adapting
the vampire figure to his new but familiar modern surroundings ... as part of the
culture of Ronald Regan’s America in the 1980s. The opening image is a matte shot
depicting a full moon, with a thin animated ribbon of dark cloud passing across
it while a piercing, baleful wolf’s howl can be heard on the audio track. This
image and sound combination establishes, in the most efficient manner possible,
the milieu of the traditional classic Horror movie, putting one immediately in
mind of the period monsters of the ‘30s Universal Horror cycle. Yet the camera immediately
pans down to what we can instantly discern to be a very modern, crowded cityscape
visible in the distance, displaying its panoramic vista of neon-lit buildings.
As the opening credits are shown on screen the camera moves slowly in a 180
degree arc, past an old, ruined, rather decrepit-looking house in the immediate
foreground, and coming to settle on a more homely looking modern residence sited
just across the road from this traditional creepy ‘haunted’ mansion -- a house encircled
by a white picket fence and that has an apple tree in its garden. During this sequence,
the wolf’s howl, which had been the very first sound we heard as the film
commenced, is immediately followed by hushed voices that form the impression
that a seduction scene is playing out somewhere close by between a man and a woman,
who we assume to be outside somewhere in the dark, although neither is visible
to us in shot at this point. The male voice seems hesitant -- perhaps unnerved
by the inhuman wail that has just reverberated through the depths of the inky darkness;
but the sultry female voice now declares aloud how it loves the night, which
prompts her male companion to make a declaration of his own, equally heartfelt,
appreciation of her physical beauty, particularly the qualities of her ‘pale
skin and red lips’. The musical accompaniment at this point sounds like (and
probably is) a typical James Bernard cue taken from any number of old Hammer
Horror flicks -- although one short, solitary staccato bass synth stab
interrupts it for a few seconds when the film’s title, Fright Night, finally announces
itself on screen, demonstrating through audio cues alone how the old and the
‘new’ are to be employed in such a way as to form a dialogue between them -- one that
takes place throughout the rest of the picture -- and that comments on and
enhances our appreciation of both.
As the unseen lovers kiss noisily
at the female seductress’s invitation, the camera moves forward slowly, towards
the house, with a slight unsteadiness about it that subtly suggests we are
witnessing a point-of-view shot which perhaps allows us to see things from a potential
killer’s perspective. This has the effect of switching our understanding of exactly what it is we are watching for the
second time in just a few short moments -- almost without our being aware of
the fact -- and the scene now feels more like the generic opening to one of the
countless numbers of slasher movies which had taken a hold on the horror genre sometime
in the early 1980s. The blue lighting in particular, indicating moonlight
falling on the white slats across the exterior of the house we are de facto
stalking, brings to mind the opening shots of John Carpenter’s seminal Halloween.
But then the camera starts
rising above ground level, and gliding towards an open upstairs window at the
side of the house – and we finally realise that the conversation we have been
listening to is in fact emanating from a TV that is screening an old horror
film being watched in someone’s bedroom. This glide towards an open window,
followed by a dissolve into the room beyond it, echoes the opening shot construction
of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho – arguably the bridge between
the classic and the modern era in Horror, as it could be considered the film
that laid out the guidelines for the early slasher movies. It therefore acts as
an appropriate reference in Fright Night’s armoury of sources, given
the then-recent and unexpected success of Richard Franklin’s Psycho
sequel, which had brought Anthony Perkins back to the career-making role of
Norman Bates twenty-three years after he had first played it in the Hitchcock
classic. This was the vehicle that had given Tom Holland the industry leverage
to be able to insist on directing Fright Night rather than settling
for the role of being its screenwriter. It had been his script for Psycho
II that had successfully managed to negotiate the minefield of problems
involved in bringing back the character of Norman Bates after so long, and attempting
to continue a story that had by now passed into screen legend.
The images from the old film that
we can now see on the TV screen in the upstairs bedroom, however, are clearly
not from a modern slasher picture or any of its forbears: they belong to the
same ilk as those early-sixties Hammer films; and the moon-lit seduction we
thought we were listening to beforehand turns out to belong in a scene set in a
Victorian period drawing room, that dramatizes a female vampire engaged in the
act of sexually hypnotising her hapless male victim into willingly offering her
his neck! Luckily a dynamic young “vampire killer” happens to be on hand,
dressed in cloak and tweed suit that lend him the air of a character modelled
on a combination Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing from Hammer’s films Dracula
(aka The Horror of Dracula) and The Brides of Dracula, and the same British
actor’s version of Sherlock Holmes, who he portrayed both in the Hammer
adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles and in a BBC series of TV
adaptations, broadcast in the late-sixties.
In his critical study of the
British Horror film, Hammer and Beyond, Peter Hutchings made a strong case for
interpreting Hammer’s output during its prime-period, between 1957 and 1965, as
an unconscious reflection of the social and cultural upheavals then afoot in post-war
Britain. In adapting the classic literary narratives of Dracula and
Frankenstein (and others from the Universal cannon, such as The Mummy), it
transformed them through sub-textual linkage to a number of apparently
unconnected contemporary issues in 1950s Britain, such as the post-war rise of
the professional classes and changing notions of gender identity. Its on-screen
representations of masculine authority are enacted against a backdrop in which
the dissolution of Empire challenges traditional notions of patriarchal power.
Hammer films of the period are consequently full of ‘weak men’ who find
themselves threatened by powerful authority figures associated with the forces
of the abject.
Dracula is the classic example of this motif in action:
instead of the alien ‘threat’ that comes skulking in the night from foreign
lands to ‘steal’ our women away in their sleep, a template that Bela Lugosi’s
Count Dracula represented in Universal’s interpretation of Bram Stoker’s novel,
many Hammer films play out as metaphorical oedipal dramas, with Christopher
Lee’s Dracula donning the mantle of dynamic, urbane, impeccably well-spoken ‘English’
gent, overpowering the listless, weak-spirited Victorian class of gentleman
otherwise found populating the Hammer universe. This element of Dracula’s forceful
dominating character positions him in relation to his male adversaries as a
tyrannical rival father figure and, from the perspective of their wives, as an
inviting sexual proposition who possesses irresistible sexual magnetism which
threatens their participation in the system of Victorian patriarchy that has
previously accommodated them comfortably in the role of ‘angel of the house’, where
maternal aspects of their femininity are emphasised and any overt expressions
of feminine sexuality are marginalised. Naturally, this threat to gender roles
and traditional masculine constructions of identity has to be countered and
neutralised in order to preserve the status quo; but to do this, the weaker
males have to call upon another dynamic ‘father figure’ – a member of the newly
emerged professional middle-classes, who has assumed his position through
expertise rather than by way of traditional class-based systems of inheritance
that have shown themselves prone to decay in the guise of Dracula.
In Hutchings’s formulation, a
wooden stake, dropped during a botched attempt to kill Dracula, or the bloody
neck of one of his vampirised male victims, are both symbolic Freudian images
representing male castration anxiety. Hutchings claims that in Hammer’s Dracula
“masculinity is (always) seen [ ] as arrested, in a permanently
weakened state”; and it needs a powerful father figure who will continue to act
as a “guarantor of the patriarchal system”. In the Hammer universe, this father
figure is, of course, best represented by the equally sophisticated personage
of Peter Cushing -- or rather the character he often plays: the vampire hunter
Van Helsing.
In light of this reading,
it’s interesting to look at Holland’s satirical version of the Hammer formula, depicted
throughout Fright Night in the frequent cutaways to TV screens that
feature mostly mocked up versions of Hammer-like films, before we move on to
look at how the style of Hammer movies in general inform other important aspects
of Fright
Night’s narrative and content. The mini-drama we see at the start of
the picture, featuring the female vampire and her hapless male victim being
fatally interrupted by a Van Helsing figure played by Roddy McDowell, has not
been constructed merely to faithfully mimic the appearance and tone of a
classic Hammer Gothic picture out of reverence: rather, Holland’s little faux
Hammer play-let works inside the film’s particular reference system of signifiers
by exploiting for a purpose the then-common assumption that these films were
cheap, dated, somewhat shoddy and poorly acted melodramas, with Holland at
first seemingly deliberately playing to that very prejudice, which is likely to
be shared by a large percentage of the audience, in having his mock Hammer
scenes look ridiculous and somewhat stilted and laboured -- when it is his
ultimate intention to unveil them later as an interpretive texts that retain
much of value and relevance when it
comes to decoding and understanding modernity.
Since the late-sixties, when
the New Hollywood film directors became the heirs to a moribund studio system,
classic Horror films of the Gothic persuasion were viewed as nothing but
creaky, old-fashioned, and certainly not very scary, exemplars of a bygone era;
Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets articulated this notion when it actually cast its contracted aging horror star Boris Karloff as
exactly that: an aging horror star -- clearly intended to be perceived as
though Boris Karloff were playing himself for the role. This was a means of disparaging
his style of Horror movie as irrelevant and pointless when it was set alongside
the true-life horrors then assailing the modern world, such as the random sniper
shootings that are portrayed in the film. The representation of horror movies
from the sixties and seventies has several functions in Fright Night: in the
first (and arguably most important) instance, it provides a chance to inject
some straight-forward physical comedy into the movie at the start, of a kind that
many viewers unfamiliar with the horror genre might find easy to relate to: the
exaggerated wooden acting that we see in these faux movie scenes on TV might be
unrepresentative of the best that the genre had to offer, but it fairly
accurately sums up the feeling that many people had about such pictures at the
time, which was informed by the perception that the actors who regularly starred
in them, such as Vincent Price (who appeared in many Hammer-like AIP pictures
of the day, most notably the Roger Corman Poe series, some of which were made
in the UK), were ‘ham actors.’
Notably, the scene we see
playing out on the TV in Charley Brewster’s bedroom at the start of Fright
Night turns out to be occurring at the same time he himself is ‘making
out’ with his high-school girlfriend Amy Peterson (Amanda Bearse). It
culminates with a joke that on one level works as an indictment of the presumed
amateurishness and camp corniness of the genre, in which McDowell’s vampire hunter,
though apparently caught in his youthful prime in this sixties period movie,
interrupts the female vampire’s intended seduction by bounding into shot
clutching a wooden stake above his head that is being held, very conspicuously,
the wrong way round for achieving its intended purpose -- with the sharpened
point facing away from his quarry! If we remind ourselves of the Freudian
interpretation of this aspect of the vampire mythology, discussed above in the
critique of Peter Hutchings, then we can see how the same ideas are now being
used again here, this time to suggest the impotent and ineffective nature of
the films themselves when they are placed in a modern context and considered alongside
their then-current rivals. Equally, whereas the original Hammer films
positioned figures such as Van Helsing as representatives of a modern vision of
masculinity that ‘50s audiences could identify with in a post-war context, depicting
the professional middle-classes displacing old money and the idle aristocracy
through hard-won expertise, now that vision comes to look itself equally old-fashioned
and déclassé when set in opposition to the conspicuous wealth of the Wall
Street mavens running the show in the Yuppie culture of ‘80s corporate America
-- the backdrop for Fright Night.
As the ostensible hero and
identification figure in Fright Night, Charley Brewster
occupies an uncertain liminal zone situated between these two opposing worlds,
which the movie equates with the equally potent struggle that takes place in
many coming of age narratives between adolescence and adulthood, where
innocence intersects with the turmoil of sexual awakening; this conflation allows the ‘hamminess’
of Peter Vincent’s horror flicks to also function within the film’s frame of
reference as a symbol of Brewster’s sexual awkwardness and inexperience, so
lending the film credence as a modern American coming-of-age parable. These old
Peter Vincent movies are a beloved part of Brewster’s childhood, but they seemingly
must be relinquished in order for him to be able to grow and advance into the
next stage of adulthood. In other words, his continuing identification with and
love for these old-style horror films is mooted, at least at first, as a sign
of his arrested development, as indicated by the content of that first TV scene,
screened during his and Amy’s tryst in Brewster’s bedroom: the hero vampire
hunter, looking younger than we will later see him because this scene captures
Vincent at the height of his fame, interrupting a female vampire’s attempted seduction
of an unwitting and utterly hapless male.
As played by William Ragsdale,
Brewster straddles the bridge between the typical good-looking youthful heroes
encountered in many other ‘80s teen movies -- who were intended to be role models,
espousing Regan-era core values that young adult male theatre-goers could
aspire to emulate -- and being the slightly gawky misfit outsider rejected by the
mainstream. The young Charlie Sheen originally tested for the role of Charley
Brewster but was famously passed over by Holland for being just too handsome
for the role. This is sometimes characterised as a missed opportunity on his
part, but the director wanted someone who had a screen presence that projected surface
likability as well as the sense of ordinariness, in the heightened sense, that saw
contemporary teen comedy-drama ‘heroes’ such as Matthew Broderick’s Ferris
Bueller attain a cult status after the release of the following year’s Ferris
Bueller’s Day Off. But he also wanted a young actor who could fulfil a
second function: portraying a character who was slightly misplaced and out of
step with the world around him, and who was therefore still able to discern
value in the cultural ephemera of another age; someone who could represent a
youthful figure who was able to look beyond the limited horizons offered by the
contemporary consumerist zeitgeist.
This places Fright
Night in an interesting space with regard to the extent to which it
adopts a form that celebrates many elements and characteristics of the wider
cinema of its era, while at the same time harshly critiquing certain aspects
during a decade that was largely defined by the social and economic politics of
Reaganomics, which so often found expression in popular entertainment of the
day by replicating the contradiction inherent in the foregrounding of a consumer-based
hedonism that runs parallel to the promotion of socially conservative family
values. While it sets up a dynamic that allows the film to appear on the
surface to favourably compare its own genre sophistication and post-modern
knowingness to the callow naiveté of the horror movies of the past, Fright
Night is in fact re-deploying the symbolisms and metaphors of 1960s
Horror in a manner calculated to vindicate them as potent weapons in the
struggle to recognise and defeat the evils of its own age … and yet it cannot
completely escape the implication that its attitudes to sexuality are still in many
respects largely in accord with those of the past.
In the opening scene it is
Amy, at this point still uncertain about just how far she wishes to pursue the
couple’s tentative encounter in the bedroom, who attempts to distract Brewster
by pointing out that ‘his hero’, Peter Vincent, has just appeared on the TV in
the corner of the room. It’s as though she hopes this perennial symbol of her
boyfriend’s childhood obsessions might act as a safety valve in this moment,
diverting attention away from the adult urges that are threatening to take her
beyond the level of sexual experience that she feels comfortable with at this
point in the relationship. But the dynamic very quickly shifts into reverse
when Brewster suddenly does become distracted, not by what’s on TV, but from
the activity he glimpses going on outside his bedroom window – or, more
specifically, in the garden of the old house opposite. This shift very
noticeably happens as soon as Amy tries to take some element of control of the romantic
situation, becoming more proactive in the proceedings, probably as a means of
challenging her own sexual reticence but producing the secondary result of destabilising
Brewster’s attempt to adopt the traditional masculine role of seducer. What Brewster
is seeing outside at this point begins to echo the images that are at that very
moment being broadcast on his TV, which belong to a funeral sequence taken from
Roger Corman’s film Premature Burial. The
more Amy attempts to refocus Brewster’s attention on her, the more engrossed he
becomes in the strange tableaux taking place outside involving the Brewsters’
new neighbour Jerry Dandrige (Chris Sarandon), who is shifting a coffin into
the basement of his house with the help of live-in assistant Billy Cole (Jonathan
Stark). Amy is eventually pushed by Brewster’s inattention into taking the
plunge and offering herself completely, removing her top as she waits for him
in the bed, only to find that Brewster has by this point actually seized a pair
of binoculars and is avidly staring, with comically voyeuristic intensity, outside
-- utterly transfixed by the strange scene in his neighbour’s garden!
Here, the old ‘joke’
prejudice that disparagingly casts the average male horror fan as virginal and
immature -- always looking but never doing -- is being seized upon once again,
but this time in order to instigate a reversal of the expected norms:
Brewster’s horror movie obsession actually makes him more attuned to what’s
really going on in the surrounding neighbourhood, not less so. Precisely because
he is unable to function unambiguously in an adult role, he’s enabled to see the
significance of truths that no-one else can see. Later in the movie, having
become intensely suspicious of Dandrige and Cole, Brewster will use the
binoculars again to try to spy on current activity going on within the house; at
first he watches with anticipatory excitement as Dandrige’s female guest
disrobes in front of the upstairs bedroom window opposite his own, only for
that excitement to turn to horror as Dandrige appears behind her displaying his
vampire fangs, and bites her on the neck
-- thus confirming his status as a true-life vampire, and making Brewster the
only other person in existence who knows about it. On the one hand Brewster’s
retarded social development is being confirmed to the viewer, for, as we had earlier
seen, he was markedly uninterested in his own girlfriend undressing and
presenting herself to him with no strings attached, despite this meaning the
avoidance of the usual ‘struggle’ to achieve such a goal that constitutes a
common sexual rites-of-passage motif in most ‘coming-of-age’ narratives; but
this development also bestows upon Brewster a special knowledge of the nature
of reality that, it turns out, only a classic horror movie fan like himself could
truly ever be in a position to understand.
The trouble is, Jerry
Dandrige also embodies everything that mainstream ‘80s society considers to be
aesthetically, socially, culturally and financially laudable. Even though
Dracula, as played by Christopher Lee in the Hammer films of the late ‘50s and
1960s, represented an exploitative, aristocratic, autocratic class of feudal
power leeching off of the blood and wealth of his surroundings, Lee’s noble
bearing made the character seem perfectly adapted to the task of fitting in
socially with, and being fully accepted among, the respectable Victorian society
on which he largely preys outside of his castle dwelling. It took a resolutely
modern and socially adept representative of Victorian masculinity – Peter
Cushing’s Van Helsing – to recognise the true threat Dracula posed to Victorian
morality and to the maintenance of its values and social codes, through the
vampire’s ability to insinuate himself undetected so easefully into 19th
century society. The situation is slightly different in Fright Night. Like Lee’s
Dracula, the astutely cast Chris Sarandon is able to represent someone who is
easily accepted by all those around him as an exemplary representative of contemporary
society, despite the character of Jerry Dandrige being at least several hundred
years old. He has the requisite masculine charm and sophistication, of course
-- as well as the looks, framed within perfectly coiffured hair; when they’re
required, he also has the expensive designer clothes that fit the successful
‘80s yuppie mould to a tee (although he also does ‘casual’ woolly ‘Cosby’ jumpers
when wishing to appear more domestic). No-one is going to believe, then, that this
charismatic, money-making, go-getter property developer, who exemplifies an
aspirational ethos and the desirability of all that money-orientated ‘80s
culture so lionises, is also an evil vampire. Brewster’s dilemma throughout the
first part of the film hinges on the fact that Dandrige is so perfect a symbol
for the times that there is really no prospect of an equivalent authority
figure emerging, Van Helsing-like from inside the culture, to oppose him and
restore the ‘proper’ order of things, since there can be no truer
representative of that order than Dandrige himself! The implication is that the
yuppie culture that Dandrige so comprehensively represents is itself
intrinsically hollow and false and vampire-like in its destructive effects, despite
its seductiveness. Dandrige is, in effect, the perfect vain, venal emblem of
this predatory age. Hiding in plain sight, he disguises himself completely by
not having to hide at all. Who can oppose or even recognise such a threat …
other than an opponent who is not entirely tuned in to the ethos of his own
times to begin with?
That opponent will of course
eventually turn out to be Roddy McDowell’s Peter Vincent.
Charlie
Brewster, meanwhile, is the only child of a one parent household that conspicuously
lacks any sort of patriarch. In having Brewster turn to Vincent for help, believing
the aging star to be the only person possibly capable of understanding the
situation he now faces, the pretend vampire hunter is being positioned within
the narrative as a replacement father figure for Charlie. In his movies Vincent
assumes the authoritative mantle Peter Cushing once donned for many a Hammer
picture, but, as we have previously seen, Fright Night starts by apparently
confirming the outmoded nature of that form of male cultural authority, which
is reduced to joke status in a world that has left behind the mores of the
society that spawned it. Dandrige’s ascent as the model man for ‘today’s’ new
society means that he now becomes the most likely source of fatherly values offered
in a culture that worships money and image above all else. One of the film’s
early highlights occurs soon after Brewster realises that Dandrige now knows that
he has been able to glean the details of his secret life as a vampire: terrified,
Brewster asks his misfit best friend ‘Evil’ Ed Thompson (Stephen Geoffreys)
what he can do to protect himself at home from his menacing undead neighbour.
Ed confidently promises Brewster that he is completely safe because vampires
have to be invited inside someone’s house before they’re able to cross the
threshold. Relieved and reassured, Brewster returns home – only to find a
grinning Dandrige already seated in the front room, having been recently
invited in by Brewster’s welcoming neighbourly mom (Dorothy Fielding). She
finds her single neighbour hugely attractive as he seems to be the perfect
gentleman; earlier she even forlornly regrets the fact that Dandrige is
‘probably gay’ -- something she considers likely after hearing he has Billy
Cole (Jonathan Stark) living with him as a ‘handyman’. This comment suggests
she wouldn’t have minded Dandrige becoming Brewster’s stepfather given half a
chance!
The relationship between
Brewster and Dandrige, then, has several aspects to it, that, taken together,
characterise it as a perversely oedipal brew that echoes the subtext to
traditional Hammer horror movies from the ‘50s and ‘60s, in which Dracula and
Van Helsing are pitted against each-other as competing forces in the battle for
Victorian masculinity. Here, though, the oedipal motif has been transmogrified
by the ‘coming of age’ aspects of the Fright Night narrative: on the one
hand, as a respected pillar of the suburban neighbourhood, Dandrige is being
offered as an exemplary role model for the younger generation; his wealth, his
standing, the succession of model-gorgeous women Brewster sees entering
Dandrige’s house, add up to a lifestyle that sets up the yuppie vampire to be
everything adult mainstream society in the 1980s offers as a role model to
young adolescents like Brewster, and which is normally celebrated elsewhere throughout
popular ‘80s Hollywood cinema.
But when he spies on Dandrige,
and witnesses an erotic encounter that turns into a vampire attack upon one of
Dandrige’s many female ‘guests’, Brewster is instantly being reminded of his
childhood hero Peter Vincent’s righteous battles against the destabilising sexual
force the vampire most of all represents in those fables, and the threat he/she
poses to the foundation of, not just societal norms, but to one’s own personal
morality. Thus, the battle for influence over Brewster between his two competing
father figures, and the internal conflict it promotes between Brewster’s tentative
desire to enter the adult world and take on the challenges of a full sexual
relationship, and the competing urge to retreat into a permanent state of adolescence
and childish concerns -- can also be interpreted as a metaphorical struggle for
the soul of mainstream conservative American society in the 1980s. Dandrige is
a personification of the dream of the yuppie lifestyle made possible by the
economic deregulation unleashed during the Regan era; but the ‘80s’ deification
of greed as an animating principle and the consumerist incontinence it promotes,
stand in sharp contrast to the modest, hard-working, disciplined nature of an older
model of male conservatism represented by the moral probity of someone like Peter
Vincent.
More pertinently, the new
monetarist principles of the Right, ironically, consolidate the sexual freedoms
of the ‘60s and ‘70s through a money-fuelled form of hedonism that runs contrary
to everything Conservatism had always tried to represent throughout those
former decades. Fright Night, then, is to a large extent a narrative
about the crisis in mainstream Conservative culture of the 1980s, and how the flavour of its economic ‘successes’
had seemed to create a threat to its own survival in licensing a form of what
was, even from its own perspective, a moral ‘degeneration’. This becomes even
more apparent as a theme in relation to the film’s treatment of Brewster’s
girlfriend Amy, and his best friend ‘Evil’ Ed, and how they are both ‘corrupted’
by the trio’s dealings with Dandrige.
Neither Amy nor Ed’s
childhoods seem to have been as steeped in the motifs of the Horror genre as
Brewster’s was, and, even more crucially, neither witnesses the suspicious
activities that first alert the latter to Dandrige’s true identity. As played by former soap star
Amanda Bearse (who went on to even more fame in the US when she was made a
regular on the long-running sitcom Married with Children) Amy’s
character constitutes a sympathetic portrait of burgeoning teenage female
sexuality, mixing coyness and innocence with tentative curiosity about these
aspects of the adult world; a sensibility beautifully summed up in the opening
scene, discussed above.
A key moment of reckoning
occurs midway into the film, when Brewster has managed to persuade Peter
Vincent that his suspicions were right and that Jerry Dandrige is a bona fide vampire: at last Brewster and
Vincent are as one, but it is at this point that Brewster’s relationship with
Dandrige undergoes a transformation. Up until now, Dandrige has always
threatened Brewster by presenting himself as a malevolent replacement father,
who, once having received his invitation to do so, invades the Brewster home
and taunts the youngster with the possibility of vampirising his mother and
threatening to murder Brewster in his own bed. Now that Peter Vincent has won the father role, Jerry's focus shifts onto becoming a threat
to Brewster's relationship with Amy, and, with Brewster having now vacated the field in
terms of his duties as her boyfriend, so to speak, in order to concentrate his
attentions on defeating the vampire menace with Peter Vincent, Jerry Dandrige
offers himself as an object of sexual curiosity to Amy -- tempting her away
from the innocent fumbling that once characterised her tentative teenage encounters
with sex, with the promise of the chance to fully embrace an adult experience of
sexuality that will catapult her into full womanhood.
Dandrige’s seduction of Amy
takes place on the dancefloor of a trendy neon night club called Club Radio, as it pumps out a selection
of ‘new wave’ synth band hits in a scene that couldn’t feel more ‘80s from
today’s perspective if it had actually been trying to predict how the decade
would be portrayed in future years. This gaudy, image-conscious, contemporary moneyed
lifestyle-orientated environment replaces
the traditional Gothic decay of once-grand castles and abbeys now-gone-to-seed as
the natural home of the modern vampire; during the course of a dance scene
cleverly choreographed to convey Amy’s awakening as a woman who is realising
the potential of desires she’s finally willing to indulge without shame, Amanda
Bearse’s makeup and hair are transformed in order to make her look older and
therefore closer to the actresses true age, and her dress changes from cotton
to a sexy silk. Most tellingly, Amy takes the lead in the dance with Dandrige;
the entire sequence slanted to play very much as a model of positive female
sexual empowerment. Dandrige does not bite Amy up to this point, so the entire
flirtation appears to take place at her discretion, making it tempting to
interpret it at face value as a feminist update of the vampire mythos in which
female agency defeats the intent of a patriarchal form of vampirism.
When Brewster and Peter
Vincent track Dandrige back to his house for the film’s climactic confrontation
during the duo’s attempt to rescue Amy and put the vampire and his human helper
out of commission permanently, Amy suddenly develops the attributes of a much
older-looking ‘femme fatale’ seductress, much like the type Peter Vincent’s old
movies warned Brewster to be wary of at the start of the film. Because she has
been corrupted by a vampire curse taking the form of a bastion of 1980’s
culture of consumption and greed, Amy’s femininity and her newfound sense of
agency become to the male heroes of the film, quite literally monstrous: in one
of the more memorable moments during the SFX-laden climax, Brewster attempts to
comfort a sobbing Amy who appears to have fought off the influence of her
vampire ‘maker’ during the finale in the
cellar of Dandrige’s house, only to find that her entire face has become
distorted by a huge, hideous gaping and grinning mouth that’s set to swallow
and consume him whole. The image was so potent that it was used prominently on
the theatrical poster, meaning a supporting character, Amy Peters, replaced the
ostensible leads, Peter Vincent and Jerry Dandrige, as the primary focus of the
marketing campaign for the film. Amy is restored to her
former ‘virgin’ youthfulness by the end of the movie of course. When Dandrige
is destroyed, his disappearance results in Amy’s pre-adult teenage self being miraculously
re-established – a victory for the conservative establishment, which has in
effect removed the liberating aspects of modern consumer culture it disliked and
retained and re-entrenched the judgemental moral traditionalism.
Originally, Holland had intended
to sound a note of caution here by having it revealed at the very last moment
that Peter Vincent had himself become a vampire during the final confrontation
with Dandrige, which would have set up the idea that the cure was as bad as the
illness and that the ideology of conservatism was innately prone to creeping corruption.
Instead, he was forced by producers to modify the script with a less ‘gloomy’
conclusion, using a ‘sting’ which sees Brewster’s crazy best friend Evil Ed
somehow illogically once again returning in vampire form to taunt his best
friend, even though he was earlier pretty conclusively seen in great detail being
killed off after attacking Vincent in Brewster’s home.
By introducing the
possibility of a sympathetic vampire character whose positive human attributes are
still discernible, Tom Holland is able to undercut some of the more reactionary
tendencies suggested by the material. Evil Ed is the comedy focal point of the
film for much of its run-time; he really is such a bizarre, way out creation --
with his eccentric mannerisms, odd vocal inflections and shrieking laugh – he
comes across like an impish, hyperactive hyena. Geoffreys’ performance makes
him the movie’s sympathetic outsider, and, interestingly, as the film
progresses, and despite the recurring ‘joke’ about Dandrige’s Renfield-like live-in human
follower having a homosexual relationship with his master, it is Ed who comes
to be seen as a sort of surrogate for queerness, walking about hand-in-hand
with Amy throughout the picture without there being the slightest inkling of a
sexual frisson existing between them (Brewster certainly doesn’t see any
rivalry there; and never seems remotely bothered by Ed’s close relationship
with Amy, as they come across when they’re together like two mischevious girlfriends);
in fact, at one point Evil Ed pretends to have been bitten by Dandrige just so
that he can make a joke about giving Brewster a ‘hickey’ on the neck! When Dandrige finally does catch up with Ed, though,
he sooths him into accepting his fate, reassuring him by saying if he accepts
Dandrige’s vampire lifestyle he will never be picked on for being ‘different’,
or feel left out, again.
Later, as Peter Vincent
encounters the vampirised Evil Ed for a second time after earlier having been
attacked in his apartment, he finds Vampire Ed hiding in Brewster’s mother’s
bed -- now wearing a garish red wig and behaving as though in drag! The
merry-go-round of reconfigured relationships that sees Dandrige, during the
course of the picture, being both father figure and trendy love rival to
Brewster, receives a further twist when Brewster’s best friend now attempts to
replace his mother: Ed even gets into the role play by shrieking at Vincent how
he should remember to tell Brewster that, “his tea is in the oven!”
Having the vampire Ed return
at the end becomes a positive though, when we remember the protracted death
scene that this character, associated strongly with the attribute of queerness,
endures when he is staked by Peter Vincent, while in wolf form, using the leg
of a chair in Brewster’s house -- and what that inevitably represents in a
mid-‘80s film during a period when the gay community was still being ravaged by
the AIDS virus: Evil Ed disintegrates slowly, and in great pain, before our
eyes, in what is a uniquely distressing scene; it’s a reversal of a sequence
from John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London which portrays the process of
transforming from a man to a wolf as an agonising bout of body horror that
involves the experience of one’s limbs and muscles stretching and contorting,
and one’s bones bending and cracking. Ed’s death is even more horrific, as
his body attempts, imperfectly, to take back its original human form as a
consequence of being staked, but is only partially able to do so before his
death -- resulting in a drawn-out process of decay that leaves a stricken, pleading,
misshapen figure writhing on the floor of the Brewster house.
The film concludes on a note
that seems to carry two meanings: on the one hand, as part of a traditional vampire
narrative, it sounds a note of discord and menace that says that the vampire
threat has not been eradicated after all, and that we must be ever vigilant
against its re-emergence; but on the other hand a likable character is
suddenly, magically, without any logical explanation, imagined back into
existence just for the fun of it, in a manner that feels like a defiant
rallying call of optimism against the odds during a cultural moment when prospects
looked utterly bleak. This is just another instance of this film’s cunning
mercurial ability to embody and reflect the competing urges of the epoch that
gave it life.
Previously released as a
limited edition dual format Steelbook at the end of 2016, this UK 2-disc set
from Eureka features a truly faultless transfer and retains the staggering mountain
of extras that came with it, providing about five hours-worth of detailed commentary
on the film. Only the booklet essay by Craig Ian Mann, which provided a
convincing overview of the film’s social and political context and its subtext,
is missing from the jewel case edition.
The original stereo PCM
soundtrack and a 5.1 DTS-HD Master audio track are the available audio options,
and subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing are also available.
Heading up the extras pile is a comprehensive, two-hour
making of documentary, You’re So Cool
Brewster! Originally produced by Dead Mouse Productions after a Kickstarter
campaign, this is actually an edited down version of the original documentary
(which also covered the making of the sequel) and features extensive participation
from the director and all of the surviving cast and crew members. There’s also
a nearly one hour-long video piece featuring the Fright Night panel, filmed at
the 2008 Fear Fest Reunion, and a collection of video interviews featuring Tom
Holland on writing Horror, and Roddy McDowell and his amazingly varied
Hollywood career. Choice Cuts is a
three part interview with Holland, covering his entire career as a screenwriter
and filmmaker; and there are several trailers and stills and memorabilia
galleries.
Also included is the original
and unedited electronic press kit – which is a 90 minute collection of
materials in VHS form (tracking issues are rife) produced at the time of the
film’s release, for media outlets to use in the construction of their
promotional features. Much of its best archival material (interviews and
behind-the-scenes footage) has also been reused in the other documentaries and
featurettes to be found on this disc, but there are other nuggets here, such
the original music video for the theme song, performed by the J. Geils Band; and
a sardonic interview with the band’s lead singer and keyboard player Seth
Justman -- his ‘80s big hair teased and sprayed to the max. It also includes an
interview with special effects coordinator Richard Edlund, the Oscar winning
effects technician behind films such as The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders
of the Lost Ark.
This home release isn’t
likely to be bettered any time soon as it provides everything anyone new to the
film might need to comprehensively get to grips with the thinking behind its creation,
while collecting together in one place most of the extras that have ever been
produced about it previously for the benefit of the collector and fan, setting
them alongside an outstanding digital transfer that makes this thirty-year-old
film feel fresh and brand spanking new. This is therefore an essential purchase.
