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URVIVING THE KILL-OR-BE-KILLED WORLD OF HORROR CAN BE AS TRICKY FOR MONSTERS AS IT IS FOR THEIR HUMAN VICTIMS. VAMPIRES ARE A PERFECT EXAMPLE. YOU’D NEVER KNOW IT FROM THEIR CURRENT PERCH AT THE TOP OF THE FOOD CHAIN, BUT BLOODSUCKERS WERE PRACTICALLY ON THE ENDANGERED SPECIES LIST 30 YEARS AGO. THEY THRIVED DURING HAMMER’S HEYDAY IN THE 1960S, BUT BY THE LATE ’70S DRACULA AND HIS PROGENY HAD SLUNK OFF INTO THE BOX-OFFICE GHETTOS OF ART-HOUSE HORROR AND GIMMICKY PORN.
It wasn’t necessarily a crisis of their own making. If vampires were teetering
on the edge of extinction, there were a few dozen guys with masks and meathooks who were ready to give them one last shove. No one ever won- dered whether Dracula or Freddy Krueger would win in a knife-knuckled brawl. The outcome, it seemed, had already been decided. There were a few noble efforts to raise the undead – Tony Scott’s The Hunger comes to mind – but, ironically, no one could figure out how to make nosferatu relevant to ’80s filmgoers. Forget a shot in the arm – what the subgenre needed was a few thousand volts of electricity delivered straight to its failing heart. The man for the job, it turns out, was Tom Holland. As a successful screenwriter who had penned The Beast Within, Class of 1984 and Psycho II, Holland was ready to trade in his typewriter for a di- rector’s chair. Bored with slasher films and nostalgic for the vintage horror of his childhood, Holland had written a script called Fright Night – an affectionate valentine to classic hor- ror that was inspired by the same Cornell Woolrich story as the Holland-scripted 1984 kiddie adventure flick Cloak & Dagger. He may have been unproven as a director, but he already had a twenty-year track record as a writer and actor. Colum-
bia financed the film even though their expectations were low; everyone knew vampire movies didn’t make money, but what the hell? The studio already had a sure thing (or so it thought) with its John Travolta/Jamie Lee Curtis aer- obics drama Perfect, so it could afford to indulge the hot screenwriter who had helped Universal score a box-office hit with Psycho II. But Columbia gave Holland something even more valuable than Fright
Night’s $9 million bankroll. The studio also gave the first-time director some of the key creative talent from Ghostbusters, including FX wizard Richard Ed- lund. Holland’s comparatively low-budget project, which included a number of ambitious, FX-heavy sequences, would reap the benefits of Ghostbusters’ groundbreaking and expensive FX innovations. He also had a dynamic cast that included veteran actors Roddy McDowall (Planet of the Apes, It!), as aging horror host Peter Vincent, and Chris Sarandon, as stylish vampire Jerry Dan- drige, alongside a trio of virtual unknowns: Stephen Geoffreys as the hero’s bullied sidekick, Evil Ed; Amanda Bearse as the doe-eyed sweetheart, Amy Peterson; and William Ragsdale as Fright Night’s perennially scared-shitless protagonist, Charley Brewster. (Charlie Sheen read for the part, but was passed over in favour of Ragsdale’s boy-next-door charm.) To everyone’s surprise, it was lightning in a bottle. Fright Night succeeded
with the very audience that it took to task – kids who lined up to watch their peers get sliced in half during sessions of poorly lit, dope-and-booze-fuelled sexual acrobatics – and ushered in a new wave of vampire
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