Hi all and welcome back to week four of the So Desensitized Spooky Season Spooktacular! Today we’re talking about another installment in the eighties teen vampire movie canon, so get ready to read about Fright Night! Happy reading, stay spooky, and go to the library!

As Dracula adaptations go, Fright Night is…kind of insane. And I don’t mean Francis Ford Coppola insane, I mean that the Van Helsing character is a recently fired TV actor and there’s two Renfields. And one of them dissolves into green goo and sand. It’s exactly as campy as it sounds, save for a few notable moments where it’s not.

Fright Night basically starts out as a wacky vampire comedy. The tone is very ‘My Neighbor’s A Vampire!’, beginning with Charley (William Ragsdale) leaving his girlfriend in bed in favor of watching movers carry a coffin into the house next door. The situation escalates, as Charley sees a woman who went into the house on the news, having been murdered. He brings the police over, and is laughed out of the house at his assertions that the owner - who they do not see - is a vampire. When he comes home after begging his friend “Evil” Ed (Stephen Geoffreys) for help, he finds that his mother has invited the vampire, Jerry Dandrige (Chris Sarandon) into their home. That night finds him viciously attacked by Dandrige himself, now fearing for his life as no one will believe him that there is a vampire next door. Now, at this point it is important to mention that Jerry Dandrige, and his roommate/live-in carpenter/familiar, Billy Cole (Jonathan Stark), are…distinctly queer-coded.

I mean, first of all, what straight man has a live-in carpenter? Like, why did they think that would read less weird than just having a regular roommate? Either way, Dandrige and Cole’s relationship is like if Dracula and Renfield’s were slightly more modern, and by that I mean more overtly queer-coded and steeped in less shame. Jerry Dandrige wears nice scarves and blazers, and Billy Cole dresses…more casual but not entirely straight for the time. Together, they serve as an excellent foil for the relationship between Charley and Amy (Amanda Bearse), as two nice kids in the suburbs, having their nice high school relationship. The vampire and his familiar next door provide a darker side to a relationship, one old and weathered, based on violence and ownership. In this, Fright Night very clearly parallels Dracula’s handling of relationships as well, with Charley and Amy as Jonathan and Mina and Dandrige and Cole as Dracula and Renfield. But this is when the story starts to diverge.

Soon after the attack, Charley goes a little off the deep end, intending to go and kill Dandrige himself after being turned down by renowned television vampire hunter, Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall), and Amy and Ed get worried. They convince Vincent to accompany them to the house and prove that Dandrige isn’t a vampire, which backfires when Vincent sees that Dandrige doesn’t reflect in his mirror. He flees, and on the way home, Ed is attacked and turned by Dandrige. This marks the second Renfield character of the movie. When Evil Ed goes to attack Vincent in his home, he references his ‘master’, snarling and groveling just like Renfield. If Cole is meant to be the familiar side of Renfield, Evil Ed is the Renfield that got locked up in Seward’s asylum. He’s pathetic and violent, having abandoned almost all of his humanity. He fell for Dandrige’s sympathetic trap and is now a snivelling toady of the undead. While Cole is composed enough that both the characters and the audience believe him to be fully human until he survives being shot and dissolves into green goo and sand, Evil Ed has none of the pretense. In doing this, they split the Renfield character into two parts, one the dedicated familiar, the other the possessed servant.

While Renfield got two characters, Lucy and Mina were merged into one in the form of Charley’s girlfriend, Amy Peterson. She starts off as Charley’s nice, shy, girlfriend with crazy eighties nerd fashion, then transforms into a vampire seductress while under Dandrige’s spell in a scene that can really only be construed as sexual assault. It’s one of the darker moments in an otherwise campy movie, as well as Evil Ed’s death scene, an excruciating transformation back to human form after he turns into a wolf to attack Peter Vincent in Charley’s home. Largely, the tone of the movie is fun and light, with Amy’s transformation scene even being offset by the actual reveal of her vampire form, with big eighties hair and the sexy white dress that she was turned in. But there are moments of genuine darkness in the movie, not the least of which is what happens to Amy. While the main male side character of Dracula merited two full characters, the women had to be just one, with watered down versions of both their traits. Because, as we all know, women aren’t interesting if there’s two of them. Even if they serve as best friends and narrative foils to each other, complementing each other’s arcs perfectly and reminding the audience about the importance of female friendship. While I do love Amy, and this movie, I do find it disappointing that the writers felt that Lucy and Mina weren’t important or compelling enough on their own to fit the narrative.

Almost every decade has a Dracula adaptation of some kind, and Fright Night is the eighties’. It combines the fashion, the hair, the TV, and the culture to create a truly campy teenage vampire adventure, occasionally tapping into the darker parts of the original story - but never for too long. Dandrige is largely a comic vampire, except for when he hypnotizes Amy and turns her. Ed functions as a quirky best friend, but his transformation into the film’s second Renfield leads to some of the most genuinely disturbing moments of the film, specifically his branding with Vincent’s cross and his death scene, an extended wolf-human transformation that is second only to An American Werewolf In London. In short, Fright Night is a fun spin on Dracula that also goes out of its way to acknowledge the genuine terror that would result in finding out that your neighbor was a vampire who wanted to kill you. Charley’s descent into fear parallels Jonathan Harker’s well, and serves as a reminder that even the campiest, most queer-coded vampires, have their dark side.

Thanks for reading, all! Happy Halloween, and look forward to the wrap-up post tomorrow! Happy reading, stay spooky, and check your candy for vampire fangs!