Day 17

Fright Night (1985)

Directed by Tom Holland

Fright Night is the story of a young man, Charley Brewster, obsessed with cheesy horror movies. After a new neighbor moves in, Charley quickly begins suspecting that this neighbor may be a vampire, so he contacts the now down on his luck host of one of his favorite horror programs to help him fight this vampire. The two eventually team up to take down the vampiric neighbor, Jerry, who certainly isn’t going to go down without a fight. Where this eventually ends up is a lot of fun, as Fright Night is unafraid to mess with vampiric lore and play around with ideas from all sorts of vampire fiction. There’s this feeling that the people involved with this movie loved horror movies and wanted to have fun with the tropes of the genre but not make fun of the genre, which is good and helps to kind of take seriously what has to be taken seriously while allowing the lighter bits to be more amusing.

The problems I have with Fright Night mainly come from one thing, which is that everything I liked about the movie, the bits where the battle between wanna be vampire hunters and an actual real-life vampire happen and are absurd and awesome, happens in the last 30 or 40 minutes of the movie. You have to get through nearly a full hour of, “I know that my neighbor is a vampire but no one will believe me!” wacky comedy hijinks before the fun stuff starts happening and that was way too long for me. Sure, the last act is amazing and I loved it and I think I would recommend the movie based on the strength of its ending alone, but it was a slog getting there. It doesn’t really help that there’s a super uncomfortable sub-plot about this ageless vampire hypnotizing and seducing Charley’s girlfriend who even though the actress was 27, is still playing a 17 year old. That’s weird and gross but I would accept it in a regular vampire film, those are horror films after all so I want weird and gross things to happen, but it felt a little out of place here. This is one of the more difficult movies I’ve covered here because I keep going back and forth on whether or not I enjoyed it enough to recommend it. But I need to acknowledge that the ending was great, and that third of the movie is good enough to warrant sitting through the rest of it. If you’re into 80s horror and love 80s comedy then you might get more out of this than I did.