YOU'RE SO COOL BREWSTER!

FORTY YEARS ON FROM ITS RELEASE, WRITER-DIRECTOR TOM HOLLAND REVEALS HOW FRIGHT NIGHT HELPED REVIVE THE VAMPIRE FILM

- OLIVER PFEIFFER

BLENDING HORROR-COMEDY WITH HITCHCOCKIAN intrigue, Fright Night follows “Peeping Tom” Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale), a teenage horror movie fan who becomes convinced that his charming new neighbour is a vampire. It opens with a voyeuristic, self-aware sequence that tilts down from a full moon, sweeps across a suburban street, and into Brewster's bedroom, where he’s making out with his girlfriend as a cheesy horror movie plays. However, he soon becomes distracted by something he sees through his window.

“I told them If you want to get closer to Hitchcock’s Rear Window, you need to modernise it; it has to have a kid look out the window and see a vampire in the house next door, and Universal [Studios] threw me out!” writer/director Tom Holland tells SFX. “They thought the idea was so ridiculous. At that time, vampires were associated with failure, which is to say dead literally! You had George Hamilton in Love At First Bite, which was a farce of vampires, and when they do a farce, you know that the concept has been exhausted.” With no one believing his claims that his new neighbour is a vampire, Charley turns to hammy horror TV host, actor and self-proclaimed “vampire killer” Peter Vincent for help. “I grew up in an era where the only place you could really see horror films once they'd come out in the theatres was on the late-night channel, ‘The Friday Night Frights’,” he continues.

“They always had a corny host like Vampira, with tacky sets falling apart, but it was all a lot of fun. That’s when I asked myself, ‘If I were a horror movie fan convinced that my neighbour was a vampire, who would I turn to for help?”