Long in the Tooth: Amy (Amanda Bearse)
goes full vampire.
movies that included The Lost Boys, Near Dark, Vamp, My Best Friend Is a Vampire and, of course, Fright Night Part 2. We’re still feeling the aftershocks today; it’s not a stretch to say that Buffy the Vampire Slayer, From Dusk Till Dawn and even True Blood all owe their punctured necks to Holland’s pitch-perfect horror/comedy. The director went on to helm Child’s Play and a pair of Stephen King adaptations (The Langoliers in 1995 and Thinner in 1996) before taking a ten-year hiatus from
filmmaking. He’s back now with Dead Rabbit Films – a joint venture with long-time business partner David Chackler – and the company’s first project, an anthology series called Tom Holland’s Twisted Tales. With all eyes on DreamWorks’ upcoming remake of his modern vampire classic, Holland spoke with us from his Studio City home about the perfect storm that revived a dying genre. Welcome to Fright Night. For real.
Fright Night went into production just after the slasher craze peaked in the mid-’80s. There hadn’t been a high-profile vampire movie in quite a while. Was it difficult to get this film made in that climate? People thought I was nuts, because they had stopped making vampire movies. The genre had been exhausted. First, there had been a huge failure, which was a remake of Dracula with Frank Langella. It had made no money. This is hard to believe right now, but vampires were dead, dead, dead. And then they followed that up with a farce, which is the nail in the coffin, and that was Love at First Bite [1979]. A genre becomes exhausted when they start making comedies off of it. I was able to get [Fright Night] through because I was hot as a writer, but everybody thought doing a vampire movie was certain commercial death. That’s where the vampire genre was, and somehow I got Fright Night made, and, yes, it sparked a revival. It modernized the take on vampires.
What was the genesis of the story? I had written a movie called Cloak & Dagger [1984] that was supposedly a remake of The Window [a 1949 film noir about a boy who witnesses a neighbour’s murder but nobody believes him, and he’s pursued by the killers], but it wasn’t, because The Window wasn’t enough to base a movie on anymore. The Window was the juvenile version of [Alfred Hitchcock’s] Rear Window, and it was written by the same writer – Cornell Woolrich. ... I just thought it would be hysterically funny if a real vampire moved in next door to a teenage horror fan. Of course, nobody’s going to believe a horror fan if he starts screaming that there’s a vampire next door. I didn’t know how to make a story out of it, though, and I walked around with the idea for about a year and I’ll never know why, but then the idea for the Roddy McDowall character came to me. That was who the boy would go to, of course, for help – an aging horror movie star. A Vincent Price or a Peter Cushing, somebody like that. And the minute I had that element, I just had to write the script.
RM18
Fright Night blends the old-school, Hammer style of horror with the new stuff that was coming up in the ’80s. Why did you take that approach? Fright Night really was a love letter to the fans, but nobody realized it. I think that some- where in there, when Roddy’s character is leaving the studio where he works, he says he’s outraged because all the kids want now are slashers running around in ski masks. Nobody wanted the old-fashioned monsters anymore. So that’s why I decided to make the movie. I wanted to resuscitate the classic horror genres. I wanted to bring them back, because that’s what I had grown up with.
Peter Vincent is modelled after classic horror film actors such as Peter Cushing and Vincent Price. Did you consider reaching out to any of those legends to play the part? I did. Peter Cushing’s health was not good at the time, and I was also told the same thing about Vincent Price. Subsequently, after I had finished the movie, Roddy had me over to his house for dinner with Vincent Price and his wife, Coral Browne. They were lovely, wonderful people. Vincent was very frail, and he passed soon after that. I was a fan – now you’ve got me being a fan, because I was a big fan of Vincent Price. But he didn’t want to talk about movies at all, he wanted to talk about cooking and art!
Just what kind of a vampire is Jerry? He has an average name, lives in the 'burbs and wears stylish sweaters. Yet he's also got Gothic art, sleeps in a coffin and is subject to many rules of the traditional vamp. Jerry was the GQ vampire. It was a way of updating the vampire so that he fit in and you wouldn’t notice him. Even down to the banality of his name: Jerry Dandrige. But at the same time, he’s still a vampire, so all the traditional rules still apply. That’s what I was trying for. It’s really powered by this huge affection for the classic Universal horror movies. I came up at that moment when it was going from Hammer and AIP to Psycho. It’s always hard to describe to people historically, but Psycho just changed everything. [It] led to the slasher films – [John] Carpenter and Friday the 13th – and it killed off the classic monsters.
Cont’d on p. 22
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