Fright Night

• Tom Holland's directorial debut. He hatched the premise while writing the screenplay for Cloak & Dagger, amusing himself with the idea of a horror-movie fan who becomes convinced his next-door neighbor is a vampire — the story clicked once he realized the kid would go to a TV horror host for help.
• Peter Vincent is named in tribute to Peter Cushing and Vincent Price, and Holland actually wrote the role for Price, who'd been so typecast he had stopped accepting horror parts. Columbia head Guy McElwaine suggested Roddy McDowall, who took it and consciously patterned his fading-ham performance on the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz.
• Visual effects came from Richard Edlund's team straight off Ghostbusters, with stop-motion creature work by Randall Cook. Makeup designer Steve Johnson deliberately made Evil Ed's wolf transformation lumpy and asymmetrical to break from the slick metamorphoses in An American Werewolf in London and The Howling.
• Stephen Geoffreys spent roughly 18 hours in the makeup chair for the Evil Ed transformation, with the wolf's limbs operated as rod puppets through holes cut in the set floor and wall. The crew once poured prosthetic adhesive into his mouth by mistake — instead of the methylcellulose meant to fake saliva — and glued it shut.
• Columbia released it August 2, 1985. It grossed about $24.9 million, the best showing of any horror film that summer and the second-highest-grossing horror film of the whole year, behind only A Nightmare on Elm Street 2.
• Made for roughly $9 million, it more than doubled its budget back domestically — a mid-tier studio bet that paid off and spawned a franchise, including a 1988 sequel and a 2011 remake.

Jerry Dandrige isn't just a predator next door, he's the death of the Hammer-era vampire Charley grew up loving, dressed in feathered '80s yuppie cool. The film keeps staging the old monster-movie rules against a suburb that no longer believes in them, and the only weapon that works is Peter Vincent's discarded showmanship, suggesting the genre survives only when someone still has faith in the bit.

Read Charley's obsession as displaced adolescent panic about sex. Jerry seduces the adults and circles Amy with an ease Charley can't match, and the vampire's nightclub hypnosis of Amy makes her overtly adult and unrecognizable. Charley's crusade is as much about reclaiming her from grown-up desire as it is about saving a life.

Evil Ed is the tragic center, not comic relief. He's the bullied outcast Jerry offers real power and belonging, and his line begging not to be made to go back to being picked on reframes the bite as recruitment of the lonely. His death scene, the wolf shape collapsing back into a crying boy, plays as the film mourning the kid the world already abandoned.

Horror-obsessed teen Charley Brewster knows what he's seeing through his bedroom window: the smooth new neighbor, Jerry Dandrige, is bringing women home and draining them dry. Nobody believes him, so Charley drags in washed-up TV vampire-hunter Peter Vincent, a fraud who's never staked anything but a paycheck. When Jerry turns Charley's friend Evil Ed and circles his girlfriend Amy, the coward and the kid have to learn vampire-killing for real. Holland plays it straight enough to bite and funny enough to grin while it does.