Copyright 2008 Heldref Publications

Abstract: Fright Night (1985) is a

nostalgic and self-reflexive vampire
film, made at a moment when the
vampire subgenre seemed increasingly
irrelevant. It tries to rejuvenate the
vampire film by adhering to its clas-
sical conventions and updating them
for a new audience at the same time.
The film reflects on its place within
its genre, developing these themes
mainly through the characters of Peter
Vincent, the former Great Vampire
Killer of the movies who is now
facing professional obsolescence, and
Jerry Dandridge, a vampire for whom
neglect of the vampire as a menacing
figure represents liberation.
Keywords: horror, nostalgia, self-
reflexivity, vampires
S
ince Scream was released in 1996,
horror scholars have anxiously
debated its place within the genre.
Matt Hillss The Pleasures of Hor-
ror offers a summary of the extensive
debate (18297) on whether the film
can be rightly or usefully classified
as postmodern and, if so, whether its
brand of postmodernism is a witty new
variation on the horror film or evidence
of a genre spent and consigned to self-
cannibalism. One wonders, though, why
so much ink has been spent on Scream
when virtually nothing has been written
on Fright Night (1985), a similarly self-
reflexive horror film released eleven
years earlier. While Scream engages
with the codes and conventions of the
slasher/stalker subgenre of the hor-
ror film, Fright Night does much the
same with the vampire film; both films
contain characters acquainted with the
rules of the type of film they are in
and require the other characters to play
along with those rules in order to sur-
vive. Further, the films seem to share an
ambition to revive a lagging genre with
a dose of humor and self-awareness
and they seem to have succeeded in
doing just that, having tipped off new
cycles of production. Nonetheless,
Fright Night is somewhat more com-
plex in its scheme of self-reflexivity
than Scream, with an intricate construc-
tion of the past explicitly related to the Copyright 2009 Heldref Publications
Forget Peter Vincent:
By Murray Leeder
190
Nostalgia, Self-Reflexivity, and the Genre Past in Fright Night 191
past of the horror genre. It is a curious
example of not only a self-reflexive
horror film, but also a nostalgic one,
caught between the set of impulses to
commemorate and recreate the vampire
film of old and an attempt to contempo-
rize the genre to serve a modern youth
audience.
Bela Lugosis Dead? Vampire Film
in a Nostalgic Mode
Lest we think that intertextuality in
the horror film came into existence with
Scream, consider what Philip Brophy
wrote in 1983: [T]he textuality of the
modern horror film is integrally and
intricately bound up in the dilemma of
a saturated fiction. [. . .] The contempo-
rary horror film knows that youve seen
it before; it knows [emphasis in original]
that you know what is about to happen;
and it knows that you know it knows
you know (279). For Brophy, all this is
irrelevant in the face of the horror films
real, visceral pleasures, but history has
proved him wrong on that point. It is
easy to identify narratives in which this
knowing game of genre intertextuality
is of as greator greaterimportance
to the films appeal than shock or sus-
pense. Scream is certainly such a film,
and so is Fright Night, released two
years after Brophy wrote his essay.
In a key moment in Fright Night, the
teenage protagonist Charley Brewster
(William Ragsdale), unable to con-
vince the law or even his friends that
his neighbor Jerry Dandridge (Chris
Sarandon) is a vampire, turns to a man
named Peter Vincent (Roddy McDow-
all) for help. Vincent is an experienced
horror actor, called the Great Vam-
pire Killer, who now hosts a revue
on late-night television called Fright
Night Theatre (usually just referred
to as Fright Night). Charley asks
Vincent if he meant it when he said
he believed in vampires on television
the night before, and Vincent says
yes. This is a lie. Everything about
Vincent is a lie; even his name is his
own fictional creation. When Charley
professes a belief in vampires, Vincent
answers: Thats nice. If only thered
have been a few more like you, my
ratings might have been higher. [. . .]
Ive just been fired because nobody in
Forget Peter Vincent:
Nostalgia, Self-Reflexivity,
and the Genre Past in Fright Night
Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall), left,
fends off the newly vampirized Evil Ed (Stephen
Geoffreys) by burning a cross into his forehead in
Fright Night (1985). Photo courtesy of Photofest.
191
192 JPF&TJournal of Popular Film and Television
your generation wants to see vampires,
or vampire killers either. Apparently
all they want to see are demented mad-
men running around in ski masks,
hacking up young virgins!
This is a fair depiction of the state
of American horror cinema in 1985. A
Nightmare on Elm Street was a surprise
hit the year before, and the existing
slasher series Friday the 13th and Hal-
loween continued to produce sequels.
The last movie in Hammer Pictures
Dracula series, The Satanic Rites of
Dracula (1974), took more than six
years to be released in the United States
and found little interest there when it
arrived. Nineteen seventy-nine seemed
set for a revival of interest in vampires
with new film versions of Dracula and
Nosferatu, but, tellingly, only the spoof
Love at First Bite did respectably at the
American box office. The codes and
conventions of the vampire film seemed
to be useful only in parody. The most
prominent vampire film of the first
part of the 1980s was Tony Scotts The
Hunger (1983), a radical rethinking of
the vampire myth that dispenses with
virtually all of the existing conventions.
The Hunger opens with the seminal
goth rock group Bauhaus performing
Bela Lugosis Dead, sending a clear
signal: the old mode of the vampire
film is dead, and something new needs
to replace it.
Fright Night vocally positions itself
against the slasher film, but it is prob-
ably just as much a reaction to The
Hunger. Director Tom Holland said
in an interview, I got outraged when
I saw The Hunger. It was godawful,
because it was a picture ashamed of its
genre. It didnt use the word vampire
once. I wanted to bring it back.
1
If The
Hunger spurns its genre roots, Fright
Night makes a show of embracing
them. Holland describes Fright Night
as a nostalgic project that revisits the
kind of films he enjoyed in his youth
while simultaneously updating them
for the 1980s: One of the reasons
the genre died away was that vampire
films were done as period pieces dur-
ing [their] heyday, and nobody could
figure out how to contemporize them.
He mentions John Landiss An Ameri-
can Werewolf in London (1981) as a
model for his approach in Fright Night;
he does not, but might as well, mention
Ghostbusters (1984), which revives
the ghostbreaking (investigation or
debunking of the paranormal by comic
heroes) formula popular among Ameri-
can screen comedy teams in the 1940s
and 50s. Each of these three films
works to revitalize a horror subgenre
with a generous presence for humor
and special effects (Fright Night was
the first vampire film to spend a mil-
lion dollars on special effects [Skal, V.
Is for Vampire 106]). Fright Night is
the most openly nostalgic of the three.
It is saturated in longing for a style of
film that no longer exists, emblema-
tized by Universal horror films from
the 1930s (referenced through photo-
graphs in Vincents room) and those
made in the 50s and 60s by Ameri-
can International Pictures and Ham-
mer Pictures (we see clips from The
Premature Burial [1962] and Scars
of Dracula [1970], examples of each,
respectively). Regarding the dizzying
number of variations possible on the
cinematic vampire, Ken Gelder writes:
Later vampire films may need to assert
their difference from earlier ones; never-
theless, they are often highly conscious of
their predecessors, drawing on or modify-
ing (or, as in The Hunger, aggressively
rejecting) aspects of them, parodying
them, recreating them, and so on. Each
new vampire film engages in a process
of familiarization and defamiliarization,
both interpellating viewers who already
know about vampires from the movies
(and elsewhere), and providing enough
points of difference [. . .] for newness to
maintain itself. (86)
Nothing Gelder says here is unique to
the vampire film. Any genre work is
inevitably caught between performing
the conventions of its type and in some
way distinguishing itself from that type.
What makes the vampire film special?
Only that the process Gelder describes
has special resonance with vampire
films because they are all about the past
and present, with themes of death and
return. Fright Night stands on the edge
of the two impulses Gelder describes
the impulses of a genre film to con-
sciously conform to its predecessors
and distinguish itself from them. Fright
Night introduces nostalgia as a way to
The vampire Jerry Dandridge (Chris
Sarandon) attacks Charley Brewster
(William Ragsdale).
Fright Night is
[. . .] complex
in its scheme of
self-reflexivity
[. . .], with
an intricate
construction
of the past
explicitly
related to the
past of the
horror genre.
Nostalgia, Self-Reflexivity, and the Genre Past in Fright Night 193
mediate the difference between the two;
nostalgia allows it to pay tribute to its
sources and contemporize them in the
same motion.
What is at stake in nostalgia? The
word inevitably characterizes a certain
kind of relationship of the past to the
present. For Frederic Jameson, it is a
feature of the mode of pastiche, part of
his characterization of postmodernism:
Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation
of a particular or unique style, the
wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a
dead language: but it is a neutral prac-
tice of such mimicry, without parodys
ulterior motive, without the satirical
impulse (114). Films like China-
town (1974) and American Graffiti
(1973) typify these faithful recreations
of extinct forms in the ideologically
evacuated form of pastiche. Jameson
goes on to say:
Suppose I suggested that Star Wars
(1977) is also a nostalgic film. What
could that mean? I presume we can agree
that this is not a historical film about our
own intergalactic past. [. . .] [O]ne of the
most important cultural experiences of
the generation that grew up from the 30s
to the 50s was the Saturday afternoon
serial of the Buck Rogers type. [. . .] Star
Wars, far from being a pointless satire
of such now dead forms, satisfies a deep
(might I even say repressed?) longing to
experience them again: it is a complex
object in which on some level children
and adolescents can take the adventures
straight, while the adult public is able
to gratify a deeper and more properly
nostalgic desire to return to that older
period and to live its strange old aesthetic
artifacts through once again. (116)
Presumably this is why it is neces-
sary for Star Wars to take place in a
version of the future that is also the
past. Jamesons version of nostalgia is
very negative and reductive, and it has
been disputed by later scholars such as
Pam Cook and Vera Dika. Nevertheless,
Jamesons does seem like a productive
model for understanding Fright Night.
2

Fright Night is certainly not a parody
(its treatment of the conventions of the
vampire film is almost reverent), and
Hollands discourse of contemporiz-
ing the vampire film seems to entail
reviving the trappings of an extinct
form in service of nostalgia much as
Star Wars did.
Fright Night takes place in a contem-
porary setting while always insisting
on a dialogue with the past. But that
past seems to be almost an exclusively
generic construct. It is here that the motif
of the late-night revue takes on great
significance. As David J. Skal explains
in The Monster Show, the 1950s saw a
renewal of appreciation for classic hor-
ror movies through television, particu-
larly in shows that featured a local host
playing master of ceremonies. Vam-
pira (later of Plan 9 from Outer Space
[1959] fame) may have been the origi-
nator of the type in 1954, but she was a
Los Angelesspecific phenomenon. The
craze began in earnest in 1958 when a
package of fifty-two vintage Universal
films was sold to television stations
across the United States under the name
Shock Theater. Shock Theater pro-
vided a whole new impetus for corn-
on-the-macabre. Monsters of ceremo-
nies began popping up independently
on dozens of local stations throughout
America (Skal, Monster Show 266).
Skal describes this as initiating monster
culture, a decade-long fascination with
horror that produced cultural artifacts
like The Monster Mash and the maga-
zine Famous Monsters of Filmland and
created a new market for horror movies
that filmmakers like Roger Corman
exploited. The horror revue format had
some currency even in the 80s (witness
Elvira, Mistress of the Dark [Melton
237]), but it truly belongs to the previ-
ous generation.
Of great significance is the fact that
the horror revue, indeed any kind of
revue, is by definition always about
nostalgia, and Fright Night here evinces
nostalgia for a late 1950s form that was
in turn catering to nostalgia for films
from decades earlier. Fright Night,
then, epitomizes the quandary of being
nostalgic for nostalgia; in the year of
Fright Nights release, David Lowen-
thal pinned down this phenomenon with
the satiric quote Remember nostalgia?
Remember when you remembered the
fifties? (12). The revue format nec-
essarily involves a trip into the past
and inspires a distanced and nostalgic
appreciation of an older product, but
it can also tip off new production.
This was the case with Shock Theater,
which triggered whole new cycles of
American horror films. Presumably this
is where Fright Night hopes to locate
itself, not as the kind of tacky film
Vincent shows as part of his television
program but as a new film somehow in
keeping with vampire films spirit even
as it updates them for a contemporary
audience.
3
Fright Night the revue
is cancelled early in Fright Night the
movie, but it is restored to the air at
the end of the movie. This happens for
no obvious narrative reason but is vital
thematically, serving as a reminder that
horror in its vintage mode, emblema-
tized by Vincent, still has relevance in
the present day.
Charley is a modern teenager harbor-
ing a retro fascination with a vanished
cultural form. He and his friend Evil
Ed (Stephen Geoffreys) watch Fright
Night compulsively and have internal-
ized the codes and conventions of hor-
ror movies. Curiously, old horror films
seem to be the only horror films that
exist within Fright Nights world. Other
than Vincents reference to madmen
in ski masks, there are no indications
that anyone is familiar with Friday the
13th, other films of its ilk, or new-
wave products like The Hunger. Fright
Night presents Charleys fascination with
old horror films positively. He can be
compared to David (Tobey Maguire) in
Pleasantville (1998), whose fixation on
1950s television shows like Leave It To
Beaver is clearly framed as a yearning
for the values of an imagined past, which
are lacking in his own disaffected modern
life. Pleasantville requires David to reject
these values and acknowledge the stifling
conservatism underlying them. There is
no such ideological dimension attached
to Charleys interest in horror. Fright
Night contrasts a pop quiz that Charley
fails early in the film because he didnt
study with the more dangerous test posed
by Dandridge, which Charley passes pre-
cisely because he is well studied in the
conventions of the vampire film.
Perhaps Holland is wryly answering
those who claimed that horror films
were bad for the youth of America
with a narrative in which horror saves
lives. Regardless, Fright Night opens
with indications that even Charley is
starting to put older horror films behind
194 JPF&TJournal of Popular Film and Television
him, just as society at large has done.
In the opening sequence, he is trying
to seduce his girlfriend Amy (Amanda
Bearse) while Fright Night plays. She
distracts him by noting that Vincent is
on, and, more interested in his attempt
to lose his virginity, Charley answers,
Forget Peter Vincent. This is a cardi-
nal line in a film where Vincentand
everything he representsis in danger
of being forgotten. But Charley is soon
distracted by two men outside his win-
dow carrying a coffin, even as a similar
scene plays out in an old movie on the
TV screen. He describes what he sees
to Amy, and she asks, And theyre
on the moors, right? referring to the
movie she is watching. This conflation
of reality and fiction sets the stage for
the events to come.
Dika writes that Scream is self-
conscious in a way that can best be
described as self-reflexive. [. . .]
Scream continuously reminds the view-
er that it is a film and, moreover, that
it is a stalker film. The characters, for
example, note the similarities between
their filmic situation and the conven-
tions of the form (209). Similarly
reflexive, Fright Night employs some of
the strategies later used in Scream. Con-
sider what is implied by the name Peter
Vincent. A viewer reasonably familiar
with the genre would likely recognize
this name as playing on Peter Cush-
ing and Vincent Price, grand old men
of horror. The reference to Cushing is
slightly more relevant because Cushing
played Dr. Van Helsing many times in
Hammers Dracula series and played
similar vampire killers in other films
like Kiss of the Vampire (1968) and
Twins of Evil (1971). Vincent is linked
simultaneously to the character (Van
Helsing) and the actor who played him
(Peter Cushing) in a way that antici-
pates the merger between Vincent and
his own fictional alter ego.
When Vincent produces a small mir-
ror to confirm that Dandridge lacks a
reflection, a knowing viewer may rec-
ognize the homage to Tod Brownings
Dracula (1931). This intertextual infor-
mation is layered on top of the fact that
the scene also reenacts a sequence from
Orgy of the Damned, a fictional film
in which Vincent stars as the Great
Vampire Killer. Vincent even uses the
prop mirror that his character used in
the movie. Thus, the sequence is com-
prehensible to a viewer unfamiliar with
Dracula, but the more knowledgeable
viewer is allowed a greater level of
complicity in the films technique. The
viewer with genre chops gets reward-
ed with an extra level of understand-
ing. This happens elsewhere, too. When
confronted by a cinematic monster, a
vampire, the characters need to adopt
the conventions of the vampire movie
in order to survive. As Dika writes of
Scream, [T]he films characters live
inside a real world that is just like a
movie (210). Fright Night frequently
acknowledges this level of reflexiv-
ity through dialogue. This is just like
Fright Night! says Evil Ed at one
point. On being told by Charley that
the gothic mansion next door to him
contains a vampire, Vincent looks at the
house and says, I see what you mean.
Even Dandridge himself is established
as a horror movie fan who has seen
all of Vincents movies. Fright Night
flirts with the idea that Dandridge con-
sciously lives up to the clichd image of
a vampire. Has he moved into a decay-
ing gothic manor because its just the
kind of place where a vampire would
live? Does Dandridge insist that Char-
ley bring Vincent with him for their
final confrontation because he enjoys
the thought of defeating the Great Vam-
pire Killer of fiction?
Two for the Past: Jerry Dandridge
and Peter Vincent
Fright Night also has a level of inter-
textual engagement with the urtext of
modern vampire fiction, Bram Stokers
Dracula. Fright Night is not an adapta-
tion of Dracula per se; it is more of an
engagement with some of Draculas
syntactic and thematic elements. They
share a broad plot outline (a miniature
invasion narrative, in which a vampire
moves in next door), and characters in
Fright Night are assigned narrative slots
corresponding to characters in Dracula:
Charley as Jonathan Harker, Dandridge
as Dracula, Vincent as Van Helsing,
Amy as Mina Murray, and Evil Ed and
Dandridges human manservant Billy
Cole (Jonathan Stark) as two sides of
Renfield.
4
In terms of its construction of
the past, Fright Night is perhaps more
thematically faithful to certain aspects
of Dracula than most straightforward
adaptations. In the novel, the Count
says, I myself am of an old family, and
to live in a new house would kill me
(19), explaining why he purchases the
ancient estate Carfax as his principal
London residence. Likewise, Dandridge
moves into an old gothic manor, a Car-
fax on Oak Street. Charleys mother
even identifies him as someone who
fixes up old houses for a living
someone who takes the past and transi-
tions it into the present. The place of
modernity in Stokers novel is com-
plex and uncertain. Stoker is basically
uncritical of the numerous technolo-
gies resulting from Englands period of
rapid modernization and seems driven
to incorporate as many as possible into
the novel. These include the typewriter,
the phonograph, the telegraph, the tele-
phone, the Winchester repeating rifle,
and, perhaps most important, the rail-
road, which plays a definitive role in
Draculas destruction, because it allows
the vampire hunters to reach his castle
ahead of him, as he is limited to slow
travel by sea.
5
But if modernity holds solutions to
Draculas menace, it is also a funda-
mental part of the problem. Van Helsing
affirms that it is Englands very prog-
ress that makes it a tempting target for
Dracula: he is leaving his own barren
landbarren of peopleand coming to
a new land where life of man teems till
they are like the multitude of standing
corn (260). Dracula is a more potent
foe in modern London than in his back-
ward, unprogessing feeding grounds
in Transylvania precisely because of
the rational scientific mind-set that
would deny his existence. The same
dynamic unfolds in Fright Night, this
time tied to the decline of the vampire
film (Fright Night consistently favors
balances between fiction and the past,
and reality and the present). Because
nobody believes in vampires anymore,
nobody wants to see them anymore,
as Vincent says, and Dandridge can go
about his vile deeds pretty well in the
open, even carrying around coffins in
the middle of the night knowing that
Nostalgia, Self-Reflexivity, and the Genre Past in Fright Night 195
nobody will suspect the truth.
6
Here the
film inverts the dynamic from Love at
First Bite, in which Dracula (George
Hamilton) is tormented by the fact that
nobody is scared of him any longer
and contemporary America greets his
name with disinterest or amusement.
For Dandridge, on the contrary, the
skeptical present is a great time to be
a vampire.
Dandridge is one of the most con-
tradictory and fascinating vampires in
cinema history. Rarely is a vampire so
humanlike also so powerful. In terms
of his powers and his weaknesses,
Dandridge is very traditional. On one
hand, he can fly, can turn into a bat or
a wolf, and seems capable of teleporta-
tion; on the other, he abhors holy water
and crosses (at least when their wielder
has faith), casts no reflection, is killed
by daylight, and cannot enter a place
without first having been invited. All
of these conventions have become less
than ironclad over time; for example,
in Anne Rices novels only the abil-
ity to fly and the danger of sunlight
remain, and in The Hunger and George
A. Romeros brilliant Martin (1976),
none of them apply at all.
7
But positioned against these tradi-
tional aspects is Dandridges character-
ization. The film adds a lot of eccentric
quirks that make him one of the most
memorable screen vampires, from his
habit of munching on apples (a vam-
pire that eats?) to his ironic whis-
tling of Strangers in the Night. Far
from Lugosis opera capes and robe,
Dandridge alternates between a thick
sweater and a chic blue trench coat with
an upturned collar and a scarf. When
he strolls into a nightclub, echoing
sequences in both Love at First Bite and
The Hunger, he is instantly at home, hit-
ting the dance floor like a natural with
the hypnotized Amy. In one fascinating
moment, before he sets about vampiriz-
ing Amy in his house, he puts a tape in a
tape player. A synthesizer theme plays,
one that has previously been associated
with Dandridge. Until now it has been
non-diegetic, but in this scene only it
comes from a diegetic source.
8
At one
point Dandridge even yawns! Amaz-
ingly, none of these humanizing touches
at work in Dandridge play as parody of
him or the figure of the vampire. None
of them make him any less credible as a
supernatural threat; indeed, he seems all
the more dangerous because of the ease
with which he adapts to present-day
America. In short, Dandridge embodies
the very dynamic at work in the film at
large; he becomes an amalgamation of
the contemporary and the classical.
But Dandridge has weaknesses that
are not initially evident. Like Dracula,
he sleeps in a coffin filled with grave
soil, demonstrating an essential attach-
ment to another place and time that
overrides any attempt to modernize.
Evidently one can take the vampire out
of Transylvania, but not Transylvania
out of the vampire. The coffin is hid-
den in the basement of his manor, the
layout of which provides a structural
model for Dandridges relationship with
the past and betrays his weaknesses.
The upper floors are dominated by
relics of the past, presumably tokens
of Dandridges history, including suits
of armor, old paintings, and vases on
pedestals. It also contains no short-
age of clocks, all old and mechanical,
reflecting a hyperawareness of time
that hints at Dandridges weakness (the
clocks are wound to chime at sundown
with Dandridges rising). Ordered and
elegant, the house resembles a dusty
museum. But like most museums, it
has a crowded basement, a mess of his-
torical junk. This is Dandridges inner
sanctum, the place where he must spend
his days, and its disarray signals it as
the place where he is weakest. The
windows are blacked out, and we see
Cole, Dandridges emissary into the
day, painting them black early in the
film; only when these are shattered can
Dandridge finally be destroyed. Figu-
ratively, the light of the present finally
defeats the threat from the past.
Against Dandridge, the film positions
Peter Vincent, who at first seems to be
every bit as much on the way out as Dan-
dridge is on the way in. His apartment is
a smaller mirror of Dandridges house, a
well-ordered catalog of the actors past,
full of props from his movies as well as
prominent images of classic horror stars
like Bela Lugosi, John Carradine, and
Boris Karloff. But Vincent has just been
fired from his job on Fright Night
Peter Vincent and Charley Brewster
enter Jerry Dandridges mansion,
ready to combat him.
Fright Night
takes place in a
contemporary
setting while
always insisting
on a dialogue
with the past.
196 JPF&TJournal of Popular Film and Television
and is getting evicted from his apart-
ment. He has lost his place in the mod-
ern world. Vincents statement that no
one in [the present] generation wants
to see vampires, or vampire killers
either establishes a profound equiva-
lence between the two figures.
9
Both
are creatures of the nightDandridge
stalks victims at night, and Vincent
hosts his late-night revue. But there
are significant asymmetries. A vampire
killer needs a vampire to operate, but a
vampire does not need a vampire killer.
Neglect is liberation for Dandridge but
professional death for Vincent. Here,
the vampire killer is the Love at First
Bite figure, out of touch and unable to
find a place in contemporary life.
The films project, then, is to find a
proper place for Vincent in the present
and allow him to overcome his own
obscurity and the obscurity of the vam-
pire film itself. As the newly vampirized
Evil Ed says, I used to admire you,
until I found out what a fake you are.
But this rejection galvanizes Vincent
into action, as he burns Eds forehead
with a cross, giving us an indication
that he is still capable of heroism.
Charley, desperate for his help now that
Amy is in Dandridges clutches, tries to
recruit him: Youre Peter Vincent! The
Great Vampire Killer! Vincent pro-
tests, That is a character in a movie.
Needless to say, even the real Peter Vin-
cent is a character in a movie, and he
must become his own fictional persona
in order to help defeat Dandridge. The
props he has nostalgically saved from
movie sets can now become tools for
dispatching real vampires, and Vincent
himself goes through this same process
of something from fiction becoming
reality (which is another fiction). As
he and Charley approach Dandridges
mansion, he repeats his stock line, I
am Peter Vincent, the Great Vampire
Killer, but with a new inflection as he
tries to convince himself: I am Peter
Vincent, the Great Vampire Killer.
The film also contrasts Peter Vin-
cent the character and Peter Vincent
the actor. The fictional Great Vam-
pire Killer on television dispatches
vampires with cool composure, barely
flinching when blood spurts onto his
face as he drives home a stake, but
the real man runs from danger at sev-
eral key moments. When he impales
Evil Ed on a makeshift stake, Vincent
watches Ed writhe and squirm in pain,
extends a sympathetic hand, and even
cries at the bizarre display. Vincent
cannot exactly become the Great Vam-
pire Killer who kills without emotion,
but the film seems to be saying that
he should not want to be either, that
he has his own style that distinguishes
him from his fiction. Still, the film
resists separation of the two Vincents
to the extent that, although he says that
Peter Vincent is not his real name
but rather the name of his character, we
never learn his real name.
The films special effectsladen cli-
max begins as Dandridge stands at the
top of the staircase in his mansion and
impersonates Vincents overripe deliv-
ery style: Welcome to Fright Night.
In his own voice, he adds, For real.
This moment says much about the films
technique in its simultaneous invocation
and disavowalthis real battle with
vampires both is and is not like Fright
Night, just as Fright Night the film
both is and is not like an old vampire
film. But if Fright Night is the setting
where Peter Vincent can enact the role
of a vampire killer, then Dandridges
words prove absolutely true. Vincent
can become the Great Vampire Killer
for real. In the final scene, we find
Vincent restored as host of Fright
Night and showing a science fiction
horror film called Mars Wants Flesh. I
thought Id let the vampires rest for a
little while, he says. Right, Charley?
He winks at the camera. Having proved
himself in reality, Vincent is allowed
to slide comfortably back into his own
fiction. The vampires are only to rest
for a little while, and the film ends
with an indication that there is at least
one vampire still out there, which, in
the films world, is positive. The Great
Vampire Killer will still have a job.
Comparing Fright Nights treatment
of Dandridge and Vincent, we recog-
nize how nuanced and balanced the
films treatment of the (genre) past truly
is. Dandridge appears to be suited to the
present but actually his participation
in the present can only be partialhe
cannot enter the day, and he needs his
dirt-filled coffin. He is anchored to the
past and vulnerable to the present. Vin-
cent, on the other hand, seems poorly
suited for the present but proves he still
has value. This simultaneous motion to
and away from the past reflects the con-
tradictory impulses in the genre film,
which Ken Gelder pins specifically on
the vampire film: toward contemporiz-
ing and modernizing or toward paying
tribute to its sources through the faithful
observance of conventions.
The Question of Faith
One of Fright Nights oddest fea-
tures is its discourse on faith. In the
films cosmology, the cross is only
an effective tool against a vampire of
Dandridges power if wielded by some-
one with faith. At different points, both
Charley and Vincent fail to repel Dan-
dridge using the cross and are chastised
for their lack of faith. As Stacey Abbott
says, Suddenly the rules have changed
and the audiences comfort in the secu-
rity of the heros protection against this
monster has been pulled out from under
them. If the crucifix doesnt work, what
will? (Celluloid 182). The answer is,
of course, a cross, but only as long as
a new set of rules are satisfied. Later in
the film, Charley and Vincent both find
themselves able to wield a cross against
Dandridge, presumably because they
have attained their missing faith. But
just what kind of faith is it?
The allusion is to the conventional
place of religion in the vampire narra-
tive. Let us return to the novel Dracula.
Modern technologies play a role in
defeating Dracula but are unable to
combat him alone. Only religion is fully
up to the task. As Clive Leatherdale
notes, [O]ne of the basic lessons of
Dracula was to reaffirm the existence of
God in an age when the weakening hold
of Christianity generated fresh debate
about what lay beyond death (176).
The Christian piety of Van Helsing and
the other vampire killers allow them
to defeat the Count, wielding crosses,
the eucharistic wafer, and holy water
as weapons. This was conventional in
vampire fiction for many decades. The
role of faith in Fright Night seems most
specifically drawn from Hammers
Dracula Has Risen from the Grave
Nostalgia, Self-Reflexivity, and the Genre Past in Fright Night 197
(1968). The hero of that film, Paul
(Barry Andrews), stabs Dracula (Chris-
topher Lee) but cannot kill him because
of his atheism. (This film also seems
to be the source of a moment in Fright
Night where Dandridge pulls a stake
out of his own heart.) Only at the end of
Dracula Has Risen from the Grave does
Paul renounce his atheism and defeat
the Count.
But by the mid-1980s, the convention
that Christian artifacts can repel or kill
vampires was receding. Whether due to
a broader secularization of society or
mere genre exhaustion, films like The
Hunger removed any trace of religion
from the formula, and religion had
only a token presence in many other
works. In Fright Night, religious icons
remain as tools for fighting vampires,
but with all trace of religion itself
evacuated. There are no references to
religion anywhere in the film; it seems
to play no real role in these characters
lives. It is not religious piety that allows
Vincent and Charley to fight Dandridge.
It is knowledge of the conventions of
vampire films. No longer does a cross
signify the power of Christ, which is
capable of repelling a vampire. It is
merely a tool that can repel a vampire.
If it represents anything, it is its place in
the body of vampire lore.
The exclusion of religion and the
appropriation of its trappings in ser-
vice of genre fidelity is typical of
this films technique. The whole film
takes place in a world that is strik-
ingly closed in a number of ways.
For example, its sense of location
is strangely indeterminate, with its
setting never pinned down by name.
Abbott describes the films opening
sequence with that in mind:
Fright Night does not avoid the estab-
lishing shot but rather uses it to under-
mine any suggestion of reality. The
film opens on a long shot of the moon
accompanied by the sound of a wolf
howling. A mans voice is heard inquir-
ing, What was that? to which a woman
answers, Just a child of the night,
John. The traditional generic quality
of the opening is however undermined
by the slow tilt down of the camera
onto an establishing shot of a cityscape
whose bright lights and urban sprawl
are reminiscent of Los Angeles. The
film is therefore not taking place within
a traditional Gothic location as the
soundtrack suggests, but in a traditional
setting. (Embracing 131)
The camera passes the decrepit manor
that will become Dandridges house,
hinting that this might be the source of
the voices, but moves past it, eventu-
ally revealing that the voices are com-
ing from Charleys television. Despite
the characteristics of Los Angeles that
Abbott points out, there are ample indi-
cations that the film does not take place
in L.A. For example, Vincent tries to
bluff Ed and Amy with the statement
that he has been offered a new role in
Hollywood as a way of explaining why
hes moving out of his apartment. This
is hardly likely if they already live in
Los Angeles. Furthermore, references
to the town imply that the films loca-
tion is not L.A. Ed, for example, wor-
ries, Then hell be able to suck his way
through the whole town. Not that itd be
any loss. But Abbott is quite right: the
location does seem like L.A., down to
the studio gate where Charley initially
accosts Vincent. So the film takes place
somewhere that seems like Los Ange-
les, but is not Los Angeles.
Stranger still, despite the films com-
plex web of intertextual relations with
horror films, it can almost be said that
Fright Night makes reference to no real
horror films. None are mentioned in dia-
logue, though we do see a picture of Bela
Lugosi and footage of Christopher Lee.
The only films explicitly mentioned are
fictional ones, especially those starring
Peter Vincent. As noted before, an inci-
dent from Tod Brownings Dracula is
attributed to the Vincent film Orgy of the
Damned. Other titles are named: Blood
Castle, Mars Wants Flesh. Plausible
names, but not those of actual films. To
a significant degree, Fright Night resists
any connection to the outside world.
So within the films system of self-
reflexivity, the references to faith can-
not refer to religion but only to the
conventions of the vampire film itself,
which have replaced God and religion.
Steven Jay Schneider writes that in
the self-reflexive horror film, [T]hose
who refuse to get reflexive, or who do
it too late, die horribly (74). Evil Ed
is the example of this in Fright Night.
He knows the rules as well as Charley,
[D]espite the
films complex
web of
intertextual
relations with
horror films, it
can almost be
said that Fright
Night makes
reference to
no real horror
films.
198 JPF&TJournal of Popular Film and Television
probably better, but he refuses to act
on them until it is too late; as a con-
sequence, he is turned into a vampire
by Dandridge and later dies at Vin-
cents hands. The dialogue about faith
in movie conventions provides a literal
enactment of the dynamic Schneider is
talking about. Late in the movie, after
Amy has been bitten by Dandridge, the
following exchange sums up this theme
succinctly:
Charley: Is it too late to save her?
Vincent: No. Not if we kill Dandridge
before dawn.
Charley: Are you sure?
Vincent: So far, everythings like its
been in the movies. We just have to keep
hoping.
The characters in this film do not just
need to know the conventions of the
vampire film; they need to believe
them.
I Was a Teenage Protagonist
The fact that Fright Night takes place
in a closed, reflexively genre world with
little reference to the real world does
not mean that it cannot be analyzed as
an artifact of its time. One need only
consider Charleys clueless mother, a
marginal figure in the narrative who at
one point offers her son Valium: this
sort of single mother would become
conventional in vampire films like The
Lost Boys. And there is the homosexual
desire implicit between Dandridge and
Cole, the subject of the bulk of the
academic writing on Fright Night thus
far, although one might argue that this
merely materializes a buried subtext
of vampire lore (see Craft; Williamson
911). Jrg Waltje writes:
[Charleys] sudden preoccupation with
the undead seems like an attempt to dis-
tract himself and others surrounding him
from his insecurities and the ambivalent
feelings concerning his girlfriend, Amy.
Although he seems to be the driving
force behind their sexual encounter [. . .],
Charley backs down in the exact moment
Amy succumbs to his advances and is
willing to give in to him. Up to this point,
the scene reenacted the classical constel-
lation of a horny boy who wants to score
and the girl torn between her desire and
the attempt to protect her virtue. Yet, it
seems that Charley, like many teenagers,
is putting on an act [. . .]. The fact that
he happens to observe Jerry Dandridge
and his shady companion move what
looks like a coffin into the house next
door gives him the reprieve he may have
been hoping for. He starts to obsess about
the strikingly handsome and mysterious
stranger in an effort to disengage himself
from his ambivalent relationship to Amy.
(9798)
Without necessarily nullifying the films
gay implications, might this not be read
instead in genre-specific terms? Char-
ley is distracted from losing his virgin-
ity by an opportunity to engage in the
codes of a horror film. He is seduced
away from sexuality and a narrative of
normative teenage life in order to enact
a role in a vampire movie. In the course
of the narrative, Amy is also subsumed,
more literally, becoming a vampire (if
temporarily and reversibly). The idea
that she is a reincarnation of, or at least
resembles, a lost love of Dandridge
follows a hoary horror convention vis-
ible in The Mummy (1932), Blacula
(1972), Dracula (1974), and Bram
Stokers Dracula (1991). Only once the
narrative concludes and Dandridge is
defeated can Charley and Amy finally
consummate their relationship. In short,
they go through the same process as
Vincentthey come to play stock roles
in a vampire narrative, and as it expires
they are allowed to return to their con-
ventional lives.
With its teen protagonists, one might
suppose that Fright Night could be read
as part of that very typical 1980s Holly-
wood genre, the teen movie. Jamesons
account of Star Wars seems relevant here
again. Star Wars needs a naive teenage
protagonist to encapsulate the gee-whiz
wonder that the audience, teenage and
otherwise, is supposed to share in. But
at the same time, Fright Night indicts
the teen audience for abandoning the
older mode of vampire films in favor
of slasher films. Just how attuned is the
film to teen culture? Alongside a teen
film from somebody like John Hughes
or The Lost Boys, or even the average
slasher film, Fright Night seems con-
spicuously uninterested in attaching its
characters to the teenager of the day in
terms of clothes, attitude, or language.
More than a character afflicted by nos-
talgia, Charley is a figure of nostalgia,
the kind of teenager adults would love
Fright Night
indicts the teen
audience for
abandoning the
older mode of
vampire films
in favor of
slasher films.
Nostalgia, Self-Reflexivity, and the Genre Past in Fright Night 199
to see because he is more interested in
their time than his own. So Fright Night
emerges as a very uncertain example of
the teen movie indeed.
Perhaps for this reason, Charley and
Amy, the ostensible protagonists of
Fright Night, emerge as far less memo-
rable than the characters embodying
the vampire genres past and present,
Jerry Dandridge and Peter Vincent. It
is in these two that the film most fully
develops its themes about the past and
the present and about genre fidelity and
innovation, with the sense of nostalgia
overarching. Fright Night spawned its
own sequel, Fright Night Part 2 (1988),
which revives some of the same themat-
ic concerns, especially in the plot point
of Vincent being replaced on Fright
Night by Regine (Julie Carmen), a
performance artist who impersonates a
vampire while actually being one. Like-
ly this is a reaction to the succession of
the hero by the villain as the point of
interest in many modern horror films.
The sequel is solidly made and would
be worthy of close analysis in its own
right. The fact that both Fright Night
films have received so little academic
attention from horror scholars remains
curious, considering that the first occu-
pies such a significant and revealing
position within its genre. With this
omission redressed, we need not forget
Peter Vincent after all.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author wishes to thank Malek Khouri
and Andr Loiselle for their comments on
early drafts of this article.
NOTES
1. These quotes from Holland come from
an interview archived online at http://www
.vampiresandslayers.com/fright_night_
interviews.html. I regret that no date or
original source is supplied for this interview,
and no webmaster is available for more
information.
2. The other predominant critical model
for nostalgia focuses on it as a response to
trauma that features a retreat into the pleni-
tude of an imaginary past. This approach,
demonstrated by scholars like Pierre Nora
and Dominick LaCapra, seems less salient
to the matter at hand.
3. Indeed, this seems to have been just
what happened, as Fright Nights box office
success set the stage for the even more suc-
cessful teen vampire film The Lost Boys
(1987) and a host of others.
4. One might actually argue that Evil
Edin keeping with the queer reading of
Fright Night (Benshoff 25052; Waltje 97
98)actually most resembles Lucy West-
enra. Ed is seduced by Dandridge, becomes
a vampire himself, and ends up with a
stake in the heart, precisely as Lucy does in
Dracula.
5. See Valerie Clemenss Dracula: The
Reptilian Brain at the Fin de Sicle for a
cogent exploration of the roles these tokens
of modernism play in Stokers novel. Clem-
ens also considers the influence on Dracula
of then-current Lombrosan criminology and
its construction of criminals as evolutionary
holdovers, atavistic throwbacks to an ancient
savage race in mankinds distant past. Fright
Night seems sensitive to this Darwinian
connection as well. As Dandridge dies, he
appears as a winged skeletal being, some-
thing like a dragon or dinosaur, suggesting
that he originated from and still bears the
characteristics of a primordial predator in
mankinds evolutionary past.
6. It is one of the films more endear-
ing conceits that believing in vampires and
watching movies about them are more or
less the same thing.
7. Vampires in Fright Night also have
faces that turn into hideous masks at
moments of anger. This would become con-
ventional within the following decades, as
seen in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.
8. One would expect this odd scene to
weaken Dandridges character by showing
how his image is constructed through the
filmmaking process. But given the latitude
and power that the film grants Dandridge, I
would suggest that the moment emphasizes
Dandridges agency over his own image and
thereby strengthens rather than weakens
him, giving him a place in the filmmaking
process itself.
9. Vincent is even introduced on his
TV program emerging from a coffin, a
free-floating signifier that, counterintuitive
though it may seem, can be as easily associ-
ated with the vampire killer as the vampire.
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Murray Leeder is a PhD candidate at Carleton
University. His articles have appeared in the
Canadian Journal of Film Studies, the Jour-
nal of Popular Culture, and Popular Music
and Society. He has also published several
novels and more than twenty short stories.