31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 31 (Halloween III: Season Of The Witch)

Boo.

WOOOOOO! HAPPY HALLOWEEN! The night of terror, of danger, of children in masks asking for your candy! With equal parts fun size potato chips and mini Chips Ahoy, I did my part to live the little ghosts and goblins their treats. I saw one kid as a Mario with a like inflatable Yoshi around his torso. Adorable. Very few actual masks though. The spooky kind, not the safety kind, I mean. This is probably for the best since according to Halloween III a spooky mask will MELT YOUR FUCKING FACE INTO BUGS AND SNAKES. Maybe I didn't ease you into that one gracefully enough. We're finishing a journey that lasted two years on the blog. In 2018 I had to watch a Halloween movie, but this wasn't available digitally and the 2018 Halloween movie had like... just come out in theaters that I'm not near. I had to settle on Halloween 4, of all things. 2019 let me watch the previous year's Halloween film, and it was pretty good. For 2020, a year which went to hell in such a way that the sequel to the 2018 Halloween film has been delayed to next year? I finally bit the bullet and ordered a Blu-Ray of this sucker. Here, at long last to close out the spooky marathon... is Halloween III.

Oh, to live in a universe where this idea took off. Turning Halloween into an unpredictable genre-changing horror anthology with every entry. You can almost see how it would have worked. Horror at the core, but different flavors every time. Like Final Fantasy. What should have been the Final Fantasy VII of movies instead is the Zelda II of movies. That analogy is going to fly right over the head of anyone without intimate knowledge of old video games. I blame Halloween 2 for immediately following up on the Michael Myers stuff. Really I blame Halloween 2 for a lot. Maybe next year we'll tackle that sucker and take it down once and for all. Anyway, that left poor Halloween III going the anthology route without any ties to Michael Myers. Then Halloween lay dormant for half a decade, and they started right back up with Michael Myers slashing the teen girls and... we're still here. Oh, what could have been. The Final Fantasy VII analogy is still apt, though. Not in a "this is the greatest movie of all time" sense, but in tone and theme. VII departed from the fantasy trappings to go in a futurist techno-fantasy setting. That's Halloween III.

Hell, the opening even mixes the two. Scanlines over the credits forming the image of a pumpkin. Technology circa 1982 melded with horror. Whereas the last two Halloween movies were slashers, Halloween III meshes sci-fi with the occult to create a techno-thriller mystery. Instead of mask-wearing knife guys lurking in the dark, we have men in suits with incredible strength who can snap your skull in half or rip your head off with their bare hands. They're rather like Myers in that they never talk and are emotionles killers, but the effect is still jarring. The central mystery of the film is just what the hell is up with this Halloween mask factory in this creepy town. Shit clearly isn't right, as bums are getting their heads ripped off and a woman's face melts when she pokes a microchip with a hairpin. I can only imagine how Halloween III hits when you don't know what in the fuck it's leading to. If you're one of those people, for the love of god stop reading me and fire up the movie. Don't let me ruin it for you, I'd love to hear your reaction to going into this sucker blind. For the rest of you, now I'm going to blab about the antagonist's grand plan.

Technology and magic, melded together in a dark pagan ritual of vast proportions. Our boy Cochran runs the mask factory, and he's also some sort of paganist looking to serve the power of Samhain. According to him the planets are in alignment for another mass sacrifice, and so his grand scheme. He's stolen a piece of Stonehenge, put little chunks of it in microchips, affixed them to his masks, and then hyped the utter shit out of the masks via a marketing campaign. HEY KIDS, PUT ON YOUR MASKS AND WATCH THE TV AT 9 FOR A BIG GIVEAWAY! Cochran got his start in the business by making prank toys and other things, and this is the ultimate "trick" in trick or treat. Broadcasting a signal on TV at 9 on the dot that will activate the microchips in the mask and melt the head of any maskwearers watching, turning their heads into bugs and snakes and shit. We get to see this shit happen to some poor kid they test it on, who also happens to be the son of the best mask salesman in the country. Good job making me money, Buddy, here's your bonus! I TURNED YOUR SON'S HEAD INTO RATTLESNAKES! JOKE'S ON YOU! It's absolutely ghoulish, a gonzo mix of high-tech and pagan magic. Speaking of high-tech, those guys who rip people's heads off are super-advanced robots. A totally wild twist, but a welcome one in fitting with the movie's weird themes.

The climax starts in a wild way, with our hero tied up and forced to watch TV with his mask on... and what's on the TV before the commercial? It's Halloween. The original movie. It's fictional in this world, but it's so odd to hear the ominous score for Halloween as Laurie walks to a crime scene... in a totally different tense scene in another movie. Our hero gets out, scattering those death microchips everywhere and knocking out all the robots. This also creates an energy circle, not unlike a magic circle, all around a ring of computers. Literally the theme of the movie plopped right there in front of your eyes. The ending itself is an ambiguous bleak thing that doesn't let you know if the death broadcast which will melt the heads of every kid in America got through or not. I like the ambiguity. It's just vague enough to make you question, just intriguing enough to make you theorize. I slept on this movie a little when I first saw it, but I have to say it grew on me more rewatching it for this. It should have done better. Who knows what kind of gonzo genres and mashups Halloween could have gone in? Ah well. It did what it did, and it exists as its own historical curiosity. So, too, does this marathon. It's done. The long dark November is ahead, and more writing beckons. Not just NaNoWriMo, but Symphogear. I've got a lot of cooking ahead of me. You, though? You all have a good Halloween. Be seeing you when I see you. 

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 30 (Kid Dracula)

And now, a little bit of lighthearted levity before the spooky day is upon us. Sometimes we need a little break, and replaying this thing was a good little break for me. I'll gladly talk about the game itself, but the circumstances around me getting it are memorable to me. It was not a Halloween purchase, but a Christmas gift. I don't recall the exact year offhand. Sometime in the mid to late 90's. Christmas break was coming and I made a little lending trade with a friend at school over the break. I lent them my Gameboy and some games, they lent me some Super Nintendo games. I remember Starfox was among them and I really liked playing that. My family dropped some hints that maybe I shouldn't have lent out my old Gameboy over the Christmas break, but I dismissed that. Come Christmas Day, here I am with fresh copies of this game as well as Operation C, the Game Boy Contra game. Don't I look like a fresh dumbass now, with two brand new games I can't play? I either waited for the New Year or got my Game Boy back with haste, but either way I played this game. I really loved it. Years later I lent it to another friend, and when I was leaving for college he asked if he could keep it because his little sister loved it. Sure, I said. What the hell. I got what I wanted out of it. In the end the joke was on me again, because it turns out that game was rare as shit and worth hundreds of dollars. I guess when it comes to Kid Dracula, I got varying degrees of trick and treat.

The tricks I've detailed, but the treat is the actual game. Maybe it's just childhood nostalgia and the old memories of how to play it popping back when I fired it up again, but it's a cute and breezy little action platformer experience. Funny enough the Famicom version this is a sequel/remake of is now easier to get one's hands on, having been included as a bonus in the Castlevania Anniversary Collection last year. Yes, this is technically a Castlevania game. A cute tongue-in-cheek parody of it, in which the titular Kid Dracula is supposed to be Alucard, I guess. The entire game is goofy and irreverent, with lots of stock horror monsters drawn in a goofy style. You got your zombies, your bats, your Frankenstein monsters, et cetera. As a child I just took it as a funny spooky game. Maybe it helped interest me in horror, who knows? Later you go to space and deal with aliens and obvious Xenomorph parodies. The one that always got me was the stage 2 boss, who is a burly masked man who attacks you with a hatchet and then a shotgun. I always just thought it was making fun of Jason, but now I'm fairly certain it's a dig at Splatterhouse, because that game has prominent shotgun use too. Splatterhouse also got a cutesy parody game in this style, but I've never played it. Next year, maybe.

As far as how it plays? I kind of love it. Knowing what I know, it was easy enough to rack up enough lives that I didn't have to worry. The bonus games you can play at the end of the levels help you in this regard, and I could easily get 10 lives on the balloon popping one. That's the best one, but after a certain point I didn't need the lives. A newcomer might, but if you do they're there. There's a lovely sense of progression as well with the powers you unlock after beating the stages, from a bat transformation to homing bullets to walking upside down. The stage hazards themselves are good and varied; everything from collapsing bridges to Gradius-style flame arcs to a tube in space level which is an autoscroller. It really is just a fun little game with just the right amount of challenge, and one I certainly loved at the time. Pity I gave it away, but what can you do? Ah well. That'll do for my little nostalgia trip with Kid Dracula. I highly suggest you give it a whirl before the spooky season ends. Speaking of, the night approaches. Ghosts. Goblins. Kids in masks knocking on the door asking for candy... and I hope they're wearing the safe kind of masks under the spooky kind of masks this year. Poor kids have been through a lot, like we all have. They deserve the fun sized potato chips we bought to give out to them. The kids will come a-knocking, as they have every year... but in between those knocks, for me? The final spooky movie of the season. The new beginning has reached its end. Oooooo. See you on All Hallow's Eve, y'all.

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 29 (A Creepshow Animated Special)

Another unexpected choice, but one that turned out neat. We're winding down here in the marathon, and when I wind down I kind of just pick esoteric whatevers for the final few posts to get us to the finish line. To that end, I literally just load up Shudder to find an esoteric whatever to blast through for the evening when I found this. Fresh content, recently released! And it's even something I'm interested in. A brief primer, since it's been probably four years since we covered this series. Creepshow started as a 1982 horror anthology movie, a homage to the old EC horror comics of the 50's. George Romero directed, Stephen King wrote, and Tom Savini did special effects. A true meeting of horror minds paying homage to the tales of terror from their childhoods. It's a pretty good movie. More in this vein continued to be made. You have Creepshow 2, which is okay. Then there's the Tales From The Darkside movie as well as Creepshow 3. Both are unofficial sequels, though the former's spiritual and the latter is fanmade. Again, they're also pretty good. I legitimately do not remember if I covered Tales From The Darkside on here or not. Finally, there's a Creepshow TV series I haven't seen. I gather this animated special is them cobbling together a quick spooky something for the season. You get two spooky animated tales of terror, so let's start off with a Stephen King tale that only took 40-odd years to get an adaptation...

SURVIVOR TYPE

We've been here before, actually. Not the animated adaptation, which is new. I mean the actual story. I covered this back in 2017, and I remember writing it in an absolute hurried fever pitch before I had to go on vacation. I don't remember what I said about the story itself so let me just go and peek really quick. Oh. Not much. Jesus, I really was pressed for time, huh? Anyway this is the narrated story of a guy stranded on a desert island, resorting to eating seagulls and later amputating parts of his legs so he has food to survive. The short story itself is an effective slow descent into madness on the part of its narrator, the final entries only growing more and more incoherent. As an animated adaptation, this one really gets to show the absolute visceral horror of what our narrator has to do to survive. The killing of seagulls, the amputation of his own foot, it's all real gross shit to witness. Special props go to Keifer Sutherland as well. We saw him as a vampire a few days ago, but he definitely gives this guy character with his performance. It really sells the descent to hell when you can hear it. Come to think of it, both these stories only have two voice actors in them. Did they actually put this thing together in quarantine? If so, that's impressive. I hope they played safe and animated from home and stuff, but impressive nonetheless. The final line about ladyfingers is just as spooky here as it was in the story, so let's move on to something a little more modern and unknown with...

TWITTERING FROM THE CIRCUS OF THE DEAD

All the snide snipes at bloggers in this one make things a little too real. This is indeed a story for the age of social media and the kids on their telephones. It's also written by Joe Hill, and I've never read a Joe Hill thing before but I know him by reputation. Joe Hill, you see, is Stephen King's son who also went on to become a spooky writer. Helpfully, he also has a cameo in the original Creepshow as the kid in the framing device of the movie. It's neat to see him come back, and it's really neat to see the generations of Kings getting adapted for a Creepshow cartoon. Anyway, whereas Survivor Type was presented as a rambling narrated journal entry, this story plays with the times and is narrated as a livetweet thread by a bored teenage girl on family vacation. In typical rebellious teenage girl fashion she complains about her mom a lot and shares some funny stories, all while livetweeting the drive. They eventually end up at the titular Circus Of The Dead, and this all gets livetweeted as well. It's incredibly clear that this place is employing actual zombies and keeping people as captives, but our livetweeter and her family don't see it until it's too late. We get absolutely wild shit like a zombie shot out of a cannon and exploding, zombies lit on fire, zombies mauled by lions, lions eaten by zombies, and pretty soon all absolute hell breaks loose and our livetweeter is trapped and crying. We're not even sure if she's really tweeting this shit any more, but eventually they come for her too. Some canny ghoul then swipes her phone and tweets promotion for the circus, stating our livetweeter will be the next act, and that's that. It's an interesting tale, to be sure, and the zombie circus is a ghoulish bit of dark comedy. I also kind of like how the livetweeting makes this like found footage, in a way. Livestreamed footage? Oh fuck, there's a horror movie idea. Either way, let's bail from this scene. Two more days till Halloween. This was good, it's worth a watch if you've got Shudder, and I may check out the series in my off time. For now, though, I've got just a few more things to talk about...

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 28 (Ghost Story)

Yeah okay, that's another weird one to try and explain. You know me, though. As long as I can squeeze three paragraphs out of it, I've got a post. Believe me, I've been rambling like a verbose idiot for 22 years. I got this shit on lockdown. So. Let us talk about Ghost Story. I admit to some fascination with the movie, considering I'd read the book first. I've only read the book once, however. Shall we talk about how I remember the book? It's by Peter Straub, an author I only found out about because of my own Stephen King kick. The pair collaborated for a novel called The Talisman, which is quite the evocative little book. But we are talking about Ghost Story instead, and Ghost Story was quite haunting. You know, a macabre tale of loss and grief and dark secrets and... yes, ghosts. I remembered the basic beats of the plot, just enough to keep me from being lost going into the movie. I thought the book was pretty neat, which is why I was intrigued by the movie. Was the movie as neat? Well.

I don't think so, but that doesn't mean it didn't still hit a particular mood. The mood it hits oddly makes me think of David Cronenberg's Dead Zone adaptation. That movie was set in winter, and the atmosphere combined with the subject matter and the score to create this very cold and haunting movie. That's the vibe that Ghost Story gives me. It's arguably the best part of it, but we'll poke some more. The actual scares are limited to OH GOD SHE'S GOT A FUCKING MONSTER FACE AAAAAH, but I gotta give them props. They are very good goopy monster faces. There's also the cast, primarily made up of film alumni at the twilight of their careers. Fred Astaire is in this. The dancer from the 40's, but he's a haunted old man regretting the dark secrets of his life. Same with all the other old guys who get together and tell scary stories, but then their sins come back to haunt them. Their sins being the ghost of a lady they killed back in the late 20's. A terrible and tragic accident we see full well at the end of the second act, when the survivors confess their tale to their dead friend's son. A flirty woman they were all sweet on got her head banged in a moment of anger from one of them, they thought she was dead and tried to hide her body by putting her in a car they pushed into a pond, but oops she was only knocked out and you drowned her. Her spirit haunts the sons of one of her killers, starting romantic relationships as some form of revenge. As she memorably says, she'll take them to places they never could have imagined and also drain the life from them.

So what doesn't work? I don't really know how to quantify it. It's a long movie at 110 minutes, and it feels like it needs to be shorter and longer. Longer because the opening bits had me, who had read the book but years ago, a little lost and confused. Shorter because the flashbacks do take up quite a bit of time. There's also a subplot with escaped asylum patients doing the will of the ghost woman that I legitimately do not understand the point of, because I don't remember what they were up to in the book. It's not even that it's an unfaithful adaptation. It hits all the beats. There is just some intangible quality about it that does not quite make it hit. Maybe it's the adaptation decay, maybe I'm just misremembering the quality of the book itself. Either way, this is just fine. Maybe worth a watch, but the best part about it is that cold atmosphere and that score. They're really good, especially here at the end of October. It snowed in parts of my home island this week, you know. The cold's a-coming. The dark oppressive months ahead. That's the real spooky stuff. Three days remain...

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 27 (She Dies Tomorrow)

Okay, so since I don't know how much analysis I can wring out of something like this, I'm afraid I'm going to have to start by just getting honest and morbid. Alright, here goes. I'm an anxious person with mild hypochondriac tendencies who's not in great shape and was born with a heart defect. Thus, sometimes I kind of feel like shit and worry it's a cardiac episode. A little pain in the left arm and oh god no I'm going to fucking die this is it. I've even gone so far as to write shit like "Tell Facebook" on a notepad, convinced that I'm going to die in my sleep and worried that the people I care about online will never know what happened to me otherwise. I told you it was morbid, but I'm being honest. I mention this because the movie I just watched is about people dealing with the sudden existential horror of their own mortality, and the anxiety that comes with the bad part of their brain knowing for sure that this is it, it's the end of their life and there's nothing they can do about it. Let's poke on that for a bit and talk about She Dies Tomorrow.

I'm going to call this an existential horror movie. There's no grand explanation for why the events happen, no greater lore to draw on. Searching it on Youtube to rent it yielded an "ENDING EXPLAINED" video, and that's the wrong lens to use in analyzing this. It defies explanation. That isn't the point. The point is the unsettling nightmare of it all, the way the various characters react to it, and the metaphors at work here. It is a movie about the existential nightmare of mortality, and it lingers on this for the whole film. We're introduced to a girl named Amy, and she's clearly depressed and in a bad way. We see her listen to the same song over and over, drink wine, touch the floor, looking at cremation urns online. It's when her friend Jane comes over that the movie explains Amy's mood. Amy is convinced she is going to die tomorrow. Jane dismisses this as Amy being drunk and leaves, but here's the really spooky part about She Dies Tomorrow. It isn't just that the existential certainty of the dark recesses of your brain has you convinced that you'll die tomorrow. It's that this goddamned horror of mortality is contagious. Jane catches it, runs to her family in panic, and spreads the horror and certainty of incoming death to them. 

There's no big explanation for this, no lore dump, nothing. This is the movie. People convinced all of a sudden that they're going to die tomorrow, and how they deal with that. How, then, do they deal with it? Amy goes off on a memory tour, and we see flashbacks of her with a boyfriend. She wants to ride a dune buggy one day, and one night they get high as fuck and order pizza when her boyfriend answers the door, and the obvious intent of the scene is that the pizza man passed on the existential dread to him. Amy goes dune buggying in the present, returning to the house where she and her boyfriend were on vacation, and finding his body. It's not really clear how he died, but he did. Jane's brother and his wife console their daughter, who soon is weeping over not wanting to die... and again, you're left to fill in the lines here yourself, but it seems fairly obvious that they go to kill Jane as revenge for passing on the existential dread to them before they die. Brian and Tilly, two guests at the birthday party of the last pair we talked about, go and unplug Brian's father from life support and lament their relationship was pretty much doomed anyway. Jane gets to end the movie bleeding to death but swimming in a swimming pool as two other girls have the existential dread. The movie ends on Amy flipping between "It's okay" and "It's not okay". Which, mood.

That's She Dies Tomorrow. Uhhh. I don't know. There's something at play here, something about depression and anxiety and memento mori. Beyond that, it's a tone piece of existential dread and horror at our own mortality. It affected me for sure. I'm fairly certain I will live through tomorrow, though. Good lord, no, that's way too much of a downer to end this one on. Uhhh. Hm. Gotta think of a good way to end the thing now. Oh! Uhhh how about tomorrow we watch a ghost story? Yeah, that sounds like fun. Okay. That'll do it for this one. Sorry the tone's fucked, but what can you do?

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 26 (The Lost Boys)

Man, RIP to a real one, huh? The late great Joel Schumacher directed this one, so I figured I'd pay my dues and watch it. Definitely a lot of mirroring with Fright Night, as it's an 80's vampire movie I've only seen once before, 20-odd years ago. Schumacher did a lot of movies that weren't his Batman duology, but the Batman ones will always stick with me. If I may, oh so briefly. I saw Batman Forever when I was 10 and without having seen the Tim Burton movies, which is the absolute perfect way for someone to experience Batman Forever. I still have an attachment to it. Batman and Robin is harder to love, but I can appreciate its turn to full goofy. I will always remember 1997 at the former Bayview Cinema in Grand Bank, seeing that movie on the big screen during my summer vacation. I don't remember how I felt on the movie since the Internet's freakouts over it have fucked with my memory, but I remember the experience. And now, to remember Joel Schumacher for something other than Bat credit cards, it's The Lost Boys.

The Richard Donner production credit and one cast member in particular gives this movie a certain feel later on, but the eerie and evocative mood it sets before all that comes in is a strange one. Santa Carla is a dark carnival of a town, night sky lit up by fairground attractions and roller coasters and flashing lights, but outside the bright lights is a darkness. Missing posters all over the place, people out of work and homeless. There's something bad here even before you get to the goddamned vampires. Once again, we're in a weird world where vampire fiction exists alongside the actual monsters lurking and preying on people in the night, but some people in Santa Carla seem to be in the know that this is happening and believe in it. It's not treated as a existential panic like Fright Night, but just an annoyance and a constant danger. Fuck, vampires are real. That fucking sucks, I'd better be careful at night at stuff. Our new kids in town are not careful and one of them falls in with the wrong crowd.

Ah yes, Keifer Sutherland's merry band of vampire boys. The title's a cute pun here. It's both referring to Peter Pan and his merry band of boys who never grow up, and also using "lost" as a synonym for the loss of innocence. 'Cause they're immortal creatures of the night who go out murdering folks to feed on their blood. Our boy Michael here has his own fall from innocence, and the obvious metaphor is a good boy falling in with the bad crowd. Except, again, the bad crowd in this case go out every night and murder people. That's a big yikes. The movie plays with the interesting concept of half-vampires; that is, you have some vampiric traits and weaknesses but can still walk in sunlight. Only actually making your first kill turns you fully, and that's the precipice Michael is on now. That leads us to his little brother, who gets in with a duo of vampire hunters. One of them's Corey Feldman. So you got your Richard Donner/Goonies connection right there, but that's only kind of what the movie is getting at. Kind of.

The last act of the movie goes balls to the wall, with Feldman and his vampire hunter pal going into the lair of the vampires (which is one hell of a set, gotta say) and staking Alex Winter before he can travel in time in a phone booth. Right, snark aside, this shit's fucked. They're sleeping like bats and the blood pours out and all kinds of other shit, but Keifer Sutherland swears revenge. Then the movie becomes a hybrid between Goonies, Monster Squad, and Home Alone. Bearing in mind the latter had yet to come out at the time, this is impressive. The vampires come, but they get totally fucked up. I swear, the climax of this movie is rad as shit. You got vampires melting in tubs of holy water while their blood spews out of every sink and water pipe in the house, and a vampire shot through the heart with an arrow into a stereo whose HEAD FUCKING EXPLODES FROM ELECTRIC SHOCK! HOLY FUCK! The final confrontation with the real head vampire is brief but he blows up better than a shmup boss, the grandpa gets a good line about how he can't stand the goddamned vampires in this town, and that's The Lost Boys. I really liked this one. Better than Fright Night, at least. What a rad little thing. Thanks, Joel. You really were a real one. 

31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 25 (Fright Night)

Last week of October! Woohoo! Just got a few more of these to power through and then the spooky night is upon us! Why, we even have a beloved 80's vampire movie to talk about tonight. Well, I think it's beloved. I dunno. I actually saw this one once, like over 20 years ago. I remembered the general plot beats, and going in again... yeah, I basically remembered all the big bits rightly. It's definitely interesting, to say the least. Funny that I encountered it back then, 20 years ago. I guess this would have been right when I was pushing my own horror boundaries. Post-Alien but pre-Stephen King, in my personal spooky chronology. It absolutely would have scared me shitless 30 years ago. In the present day? Fine, with some gnarly bits. Let's poke at it.

Parts of this feel like Dracula 1985. I don't know if there's a Dracula movie that came out in 1985, but this take on the vampire is very traditional with the rules and weaknesses and all. Has to be invited in, turns into bats and wolves, weak to holy stuff and garlic and stakes through the heart. All stock and standard, but let loose upon the NINETEEEN EIGHTIES! Well, specifically suburbia. Which I guess is 80's enough. The first 50 minutes of this sort of play on the aggravating "NOBODY BELIEVES I SAW A SUPERNATURAL THING" trope. Not as aggravating as it could have been, but you really feel poor Charley's desperation as he finds out his new neighbor's a vampire, tries to stop him and fails, and has nobody believe him even as this vampire is like HA HA HA CHARLEY I AM GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOU TONIGHT. It's spooky shit to have to deal with, but Charley tries to enlist an expert... and this is where we get the wonderful Roddy McDowell as Peter Vincent. The name's obviously meant to invoke Peter Cushing and Vincent Price, as he's a former movie star famous for playing vampire hunters who now hosts a late night horror movie show called Fright Night. 

Actually, let me poke at that for a bit, because this is fun to think about. The universe of this film is one in which someone like Peter Vincent can make a career out of playing vampire hunters in movies. It is also one where fucking vampires exist. When the vampire meets Vincent later for the "test" to try and keep Charley from fucking murdering a guy, he mentions he loves the man's work. It could be bullshitting, but like... Do you think the vampire resents this guy for making a career out of pretending to kill vampires? It's something wild to think about. Either way, 50 minutes into the movie, Peter Vincent finds out vampires fucking exist and damn near loses his shit. Like you would if you spent 20 years pretending to kill a pretend monster for a living only to find the fucking things really exist and want you dead. This leads us into the madcap second half where the vampire goes after Charley's friends. He straight up turns one, but Charley's girlfriend he goes after in a much more seductive way. It's an old horror movie trope where the female lead is a dead ringer for the monster's long-lost lover from 100 years ago or whatever, but I find it all a little weird in an age-gap sort of way. Not even in the fact that the vampire's hundreds of years old, but like... he looks like a dude in his 30s and he's puttin' the moves on this girl on the dance floor. Uh.

To say nothing of the scene where he has her back in his lair and turns her, which. Uhhhh. The last bits of this movie are some wild vampire fightin' action as Charley and Peter Vincent team up. There may be a little metacommentary here. Peter Vincent, earlier in the movie, gets fired from his TV host job because the ratings are down and all kids want to see these days are slasher villains in ski masks. That isn't the exact line, but he's lamenting the changing tastes of the Kids These Days, and the shift from gothic horror of the 60's and 70's to the slashers of the 80's. Except his unique skillset and knowledge come in here, in this situation, so he's relevant again. One wonders if they asked Peter Cushing himself to do this. That would have clicked that whole "old horror hero faces the return of the old monster in a new age" theme click. Anyway, the climax slaps. You got monster face Amy, a zombie dude melting on screen that's really gnarly, and the final defeat of the vampire with some gonzo effects. Yeah, that's Fright Night for you. It's neat. No goth David Tennant, but it's pretty neat. I wonder if there are any other 80's vampire movies I can peek at.