advances was when the bat pulls loose when the sun hits and flies down the hall- way to the basement. That’s Richard Edlund. I have the props here. The bat is spectacular. It cost me about five grand to have it prepared and posed and en- cased, but it was some of the best money I’ve ever spent.


How did you go about finding the key talent for the film, particularly the young actors? I had a wonderful casting director. Her name was Jackie Burch, and she did a hell of a job. She knew everybody who was young in town, and [then head of Columbia Pictures] Guy McElwaine provided Roddy. But I knew Roddy because I had written Class of 1984 and he did a very, very nice turn in that as the teacher who breaks down and threatens the bad kid with a gun. So I was thrilled to get Roddy. He saw Peter Vincent as the cowardly lion and it was just a wonderful performance. So that left me with the vampire. Several people turned it down because everybody thought that vampires were over – that they were corny, that they were old-fash- ioned. And then I got Chris Sarandon. I had to really work to do it. We had dinner, I met with his manager, we went over the script, and I finally convinced him to take the chance with a first-time director, which had him scared. But he loved the part. He saw the potential of the role, and he did a brilliant job.


Heads Up!: Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall) fends off Evil Ed (Stephen Geof- freys), and (bottom) the Renfield-like Billy Cole (Jonathan Stark) suffers a meltdown.


By the way, just what sort of creature is Jerry’s roommate, Billy Cole, supposed to be? He’s been bitten but he hasn’t been changed. ... Billy Cole is Renfield. He hasn’t been turned completely yet, but he’s on his way.


You wrote several horror/thriller scripts in the late ’70s and early ’80s, but Fright Night was your directorial debut. Was that a matter of choice or opportunity? It was because I had just written a film called Scream for Help [1984], which was unre- leasable. I don’t want to say anything bad against the director, but I directed Fright Night to protect the material. I knew exactly what I wanted, and thank God that I got the op- portunity to do it. I’d had a huge success with Psycho II [1983] and Cloak & Dagger came out around that time, but then Scream for Help barely saw the light of day. So you have that kind of thing happen, and you want to protect what you’ve written. But I started out wanting to direct, and one of the ways to get to direct in those days was to write.


I understand that Columbia pretty much left you alone and let you make the film you wanted to make. It was wonderful, because it was a small, throwaway movie on their slate. All eyes were on Perfect, with John Travolta. You couldn’t have gotten any hotter [than Travolta] at the time, and it also had Jamie Lee Curtis. They thought that was going to be their huge movie, and nobody expected anything out of Fright Night. It was their lowest-budget project at the time. I got very, very lucky because I inherited the FX of Richard Edlund. Richard was just coming off of Ghostbusters, so all the problems they’d had doing things like optical printing and matte shots, they had solved on a much, much bigger movie. So I got the benefit of the technological advances from Ghostbusters.


Besides Ghostbusters, Edlund had also worked on Poltergeist, Raiders of the Lost Ark and the first two Star Wars films. How did he help shape Fright Night? He knew what the outer edge of possible was. Where you really see Richard is where Chris Sarandon dives off of the balcony railing and swoops down on Roddy and Bill Ragsdale at the bottom of the stairs. He goes over, you see a bat, they go off the bat, they go onto the shadows – I think there’s a cut in there someplace – and then they go onto the puppet bat attacking the two leads. That optical was all Richard Edlund. And the other one where he had really made huge


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How about the unforgettable Stephen Geoffreys? Jackie’s casting of Stephen Geoffreys was a brilliant gambit. There was a very fa- mous director who’s no longer with us – Colin Higgins – and I had Colin in to look at it. Colin thought that Stephen Geoffreys was over-the-top. He thought Stephen was too big. We [rehearsed] it like a play, and Colin was worried that, if he was that big on stage, he’d be too big for the screen.


We've heard you had some interesting ways of getting the performances you wanted from the cast, notably not allowing William Ragsdale to see the vampiric Amy's makeup before shooting. Can you elaborate? We rehearsed for two weeks solid. So we had worked out all of the visuals and any performance questions or problems before we even hit the sound stage. That was because a lot of the shots were FX shots or had to be rigged. Because that took so much time, the actors had to be fully prepped. I had a terrific cast, and they really worked and we were able to do it. We had a very, very tight budget. If you have a two-week rehearsal, at the end of that you have a very tightly knit group of people.


I understand Chris Sarandon contributed a lot of ideas. He wanted to deepen the character of Jerry. He was looking for a past – a thou- sand-year past. He contributed the idea of Jerry eating the apple, because that cleaned his fangs, and it gave him a physical object to handle, which rooted his performance in reality. He had the idea of Jerry having been in love with an an- cestor of Amy’s, and that’s why you have the painting that Charley discovers when he’s looking through the house. Chris brought a sense of sadness, of the past, of the centuries, to Jerry.


Chris has that great line when Jerry attacks Charley in his bedroom and tells him he’s going to give him something he himself never had – a choice. Yes. I don’t think Chris wrote that line, but Chris’ urging led to that line. That deep- ening of character came more out of the rehearsals and the discussions, because we had time to do that. I had time to listen to what the actors said about their parts, so I was able to change and tweak it a little. It worked very, very well.


Much has been made of the supposed gay subtext in Fright Night. How much of that was intentional, and how much was just the typical homoeroticism that finds its way into many vampire stories? Yes. [Laughs] Evil Ed led to that in a way. He was the nerd, the strange kid, the horror fan. In a way, that’s an inch away from being gay. You’re the outsider. Anyone who’s different is bullied.


You can also make that statement when Chris says, “You know, I’m different, too.” But it’s also because vampires are seductive. Yes, there was a deliberate subtext. But at the same time, it was edgy and in- teresting. It just seemed to work thematically,


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