{"id":3083,"date":"2011-08-21T11:14:20","date_gmt":"2011-08-21T17:14:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.delirium.org\/?p=3083"},"modified":"2024-08-08T18:14:09","modified_gmt":"2024-08-09T00:14:09","slug":"fright-night-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/?p=3083","title":{"rendered":"Fright Night (2011)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>A number of years ago<\/a>, I declared Fright Night to be the best vampire movie. I’m glad I did this, because it would be implausible to just make the claim now. “No, seriously, you guys, I totally always thought so!” Plus, of course, I stopped thinking so just recently, because Let the Right One In<\/a> was downright incredible; that said, I do not mind drawing a line between film from the vampire’s point of view and film from the slayer’s point of view, and letting them therefore split the honor evenly. Completely different movies, and while the Swedes made the objectively better one, Chris Sarandon has a lot going for him on the non-art-house, specifically vampire-focussed front.<\/p>\n

None of this would be worth hashing out, of course, except for how someone (apparently, Marti Noxon! Who knew?) decided to remake Fright Night<\/a>. So, I was pretty ambivalent about that[1]. On the one hand, it’s been better than a generation since the original came out, so there are upsides to modernizing the characters and the effects. But on the other hand, man, I loved that movie, and since when does Hollywood ever do a good job of reinterpreting something that was itself originally good? Since now, I guess!<\/p>\n

‘Cause, yeah, the modern Fright Night? Still in my top five vampire movies, I suppose primarily on the strength of the core story, which is by and large unchanged. See, there’s this kid living with his single mother, and strange things start to happen. Before very long at all, he narrows them down to his recently moved-in neighbor Jerry, who he believes is a vampire. And then, you know, hijinx ensue! Just like in the original, the show stealer is the mentor character, a late night TV host played by Roddy McDowall in the original and a Las Vegas magician played by David Tennant this time out. People call the movie part comedy, but I never really thought that was right. It’s just excellent at the tension relief that most horror movies aspire to, without ever actually removing the fear. I guess it’s that I can’t believe that any movie this good at providing a scary and realistic portrayal of \u00a0modern vampires[2] can be a comedy. But yeah, it’s pretty damn funny. Sometimes<\/em>. The rest of the time, it is creepy, or scary, or awesome.<\/p>\n

[1] In the torn way rather than the barely stirring myself to care way.
\n[2] I mean, actually scary vampires in modernity, as opposed to the angsty, misunderstood, paranormal romance vampires that have taken over the landscape. You know, I might like this movie just as much without nostalgia, simply by virtue of being about an honest, straightforward, hungry<\/em> vampire, who isn’t in love with anyone and isn’t trying to reform himself. Seriously, guys, we get it, it’s played out! (I am all the more surprised this was Marti Noxon,\u00a0now\u00a0that I’m really thinking about it!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A number of years ago, I declared Fright Night to be the best vampire movie. I’m glad I did this, because it would be implausible to just make the claim now. “No, seriously, you guys, I totally always thought so!” Plus, of course, I stopped thinking so just recently, because Let the Right One In […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[30],"class_list":["post-3083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","tag-horror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3083"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3083\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9323,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3083\/revisions\/9323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}