Review: Tom Holland’s Fright Night Gets a Limited Edition Steelbook 4K Ultra HD

Fright Night fearlessly blends horror and comedy into one fetching confection.

Fright NightTom Holland’s Fright Night is one of those 1980s films, like The Howling and Re-Animator, that fearlessly blends horror and comedy into one fetching confection. This requires a delicate balancing act to prevent one mood from undercutting and thus negating the other. Making his debut as a feature filmmaker, Holland acquits himself admirably. The comedy aspects shine through owing to sharp writing and a game cast of both seasoned veterans and talented newcomers. On the other hand, the efficacy of the often gloopy horror elements can be ascribed to a crew of makeup and visual effects personnel who were fresh off making the immensely popular Ghostbusters.

At first, the setup for Fright Night seems practically archetypal. Typically, a teenager witnesses something horrible, fails to convince anyone in authority that the threat is real, thereby forcing them to face down the monster or murderer themselves, often aided by a ragtag crew of similar outsider figures. Here all those elements are firmly in place, but the story plays out very differently nevertheless.

Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale) discovers that his new neighbor, Jerry Dandridge (Chris Sarandon), is a vampire who prefers feeding at home. At first, neither his girlfriend, Amy (Amanda Bearse), nor his best friend, Evil Ed (Stephen Geoffreys), believe him, nor local TV horror host, Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall), to whom he appeals for advice and assistance. Rather than rally behind him, Charley’s support group is slowly picked off by Dandridge, until only he and Peter Vincent remain to handle the horrors in Dandridge’s domicile.

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Holland cannily uses the figure of Peter Vincent to emphasize the fact that Fright Night is (at least superficially) an affectionate throwback to old-fashioned monster movies, akin to Fred Dekker’s The Monster Squad, another love letter to Universal horror films. What’s more, from what we see of the movies that Peter Vincent shows (in which he also stars as a vampire killer), Fright Night also owes a clear debt to Hammer Film Productions. Ironically, Peter Vincent informs Charley when they first meet that he’s just been fired from his job, because kids today prefer slasher films featuring all-too-human monstrosities like Jason Vorhees.

Holland finds intriguing ways to handle the film’s exploration of sexuality, the theme most often brought to forefront by vampire tales. Fright Night playfully opens with the sounds of seduction playing over the camera’s slow track through a suburban neighborhood before zeroing in on a particular window. Inside, we find that the noises are coming from a vampire movie playing on a TV, while Charley and Amy are lying on the floor, necking and considering going further.

Charley and Amy are thus on the threshold of mature sexuality, a prospect that’s nearly ubiquitous in the teen sex comedies of the ’80s. But tensions soon arise: First one, then the other, hesitates to go all the way before Charley’s attention is wholly diverted by the sounds of his new neighbor’s arrival. This is symbolic of the fact that Jerry Dandridge will be the entryway for both Charley and Amy’s introductions to adult sexual life.

The film suggests that Jerry doesn’t just swing one way. While he seems heterosexually inclined, there are aspects of his behavior that indicate a bisexual or even omnisexual disposition. First off, there’s the nebulous relationship between Jerry and his protector/roommate/whatever he is, Billy (Jonathan Stark). At several points, they’re posed together like a romantic couple. Then there’s the scene where Billy is tending to a wound Jerry sustained in a tussle with Charley: Billy’s posed on his knees in front of Jerry, lending him some sort of succor.

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This submissive position is echoed later in the scene where Jerry “turns” Evil Ed, with the image of Evil Ed on his knees before Jerry accompanied by language that acknowledges Ed’s “difference” from other people. Jerry offers him an existence where he’ll never again be teased or bullied for that difference. There’s also something symbolically resonant in a later scene that features Evil Ed’s protracted demise as Peter Vincent looks on in mingled pity and horror. It’s possible to read this as a metaphor for an inter-generational recognition of the contemporary AIDS crisis, which in 1985 was reaching pandemic proportions.

Holland’s film explains Jerry’s attraction to (and pursuit of) Amy by showing a portrait of a woman who looks just like her in Jerry’s house, the memento of a long-lost love. This same gambit is used in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, though Fright Night ultimately makes much less of the resemblance than Francis Ford Coppola’s film. After Jerry vampirizes her, Amy quite literally lets her hair down, adjusting her dress so that her décolletage is prominently on display, a move Winona Ryder also makes in the Coppola film.

For all that, when Jerry’s threat has been disposed of, it’s back to the status quo: The final scene finds Charley and Amy in his bedroom, mid-embrace, while (in an amusing touch) a voice on the television informs us that we’re right back where we started. The final shot of Charley peering over into Jerry’s bedroom window suggests that things are about to start all over again. The chilling laughter that ends the film may just be a bid to ensure the inevitable sequel (which indeed followed without Holland’s participation), but Charley’s unabashed curiosity also puts into question whether he’s learned anything at all from his earlier turn as a Peeping Tom.

Image/Sound

The image on the UHD disc of Fright Night looks frightfully good, improving in all the usual ways over earlier Blu-ray editions, with more deeply saturated colors, profound blacks, and far more depth and clarity to the image overall. The Dolby Atmos audio track is quite active, loaded with ambient effects, and giving an appreciable boost to Brad Fiedel’s haunting New Wave-inflected score. Master Audio surround and stereo tracks are also available.

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Extras

Sony’s presentation of Fright Night comes stacked to the gills with bonus materials, spread over two Blu-ray discs. There are two commentary tracks with writer-director Tom Holland joined by various members of the cast and crew. These, combined with the whopping two-and-a-half-hour long You’re So Cool, Brewster! making-of documentary, should tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the genesis, production, and reception of Fright Night.

But the extras don’t stop there. First off, there are several roundtable discussions that play like outtakes from You’re So Cool, Brewster!, as well as some panel discussions and screening Q&As. Then there are a couple of brand new pieces: a lengthy 35th anniversary table read of the film’s screenplay, an enjoyable featurette on the novelization process (as well as the recent reprint of the Fright Night novel by Encyclopocalypse Publications), and a truly fascinating conversation between Hannibal creator Bryan Fuller and actor Amanda Bearse about the gay subtext and context of the film that really digs deep into the material.

Overall

Tom Holland’s Fright Night uses the trappings of old-fashioned monster movies to explore sexual terrain that’s decidedly from the 1980s.

Score: 
 Cast: Chris Sarandon, William Ragsdale, Amanda Bearse, Stephen Geoffreys, Roddy McDowall, Jonathan Stark, Art J. Evans, Stewart Stern  Director: Tom Holland  Screenwriter: Tom Holland  Distributor: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment  Running Time: 107 min  Rating: R  Year: 1985  Release Date: October 4, 2022  Buy: Video

Budd Wilkins

Budd Wilkins's writing has appeared in Film Journal International and Video Watchdog. He is a member of the Online Film Critics Society.

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