Writer-Director Tom Holland never went very far. His somewhat stunted career is partially the result of his plunge into the dark depths of the Stephen King miniseries mirror-universe (including taking the dreaded “King miniseries” to new lows with the truly abysmal The Langoliers). But even his successes are compromised in various forms, and none of them distinctly insist on his role in developing them. His screenplay for Psycho II was directed by Richard Franklin, and that sequel was as much a calling card for returning star Anthony Perkins, whose androgynous and nervously gentle form never quite found a home in Hollywood. 1988’s Child’s Play, thoughtfully directed with a classical eye for perspective and absence by Holland, would soon become the brainchild of franchise mastermind Don Mancini, who eventually took the killer doll to new heights of meta-ironic deconstruction and (beautiful) lows of self-debasement,  transforming the franchise into a labor of diabolical love. Tom Holland, a comparatively straight shooter who seemed mostly content with craft rather than art, never stood a chance.

Which isn’t to say that Fright Night is ready and willing to salvage a would-be auteur by rediscovering a particularly idiosyncratic text birthed into the world by a heroically singular voice. Fright Night is, in fact, a thoroughly, proudly old-fashioned picture, a piece of quality machine work, both as a matter of content and a principle of form. Its interests are salvaging and remounting a tradition, not personalizing a voice. The film’s pitch was to to see whether an old-time horror film could, as it were, survive in an era of the slasher craze. This has an ever-so slight patina of meta-textual self-referentiality, but Fright Night mostly plays it straight. It isn’t as dexterous in its tonal mischief as Evil Dead II nor as frisky in its manipulation of the body as Re-Animator. If it doesn’t reach the fiendishly playful heights of either of those films, it never really seems interested in them in the first place.

Instead of the stoic, violently tranquil Jason Vorhees or the loquaciously cruel, try-hard Freddy Kreuger, the ghoul here is the classically cunning vampire Jerry Dandridge (Chris Sarandon), who has recently moved next door to Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale) and his mother Amy (Amanda Bearse). With Sarandon’s chiseled features and confident, subtly antagonistic smirk, he seems to be the pure embodiment of charm, which doesn’t stop Charley from being immediately suspicious when a woman he sees enter Jerry’s house is found dead the next day. His suspicions, however, aren’t enough to defray his mother, who has already invited Dandridge into the house. Straightforward stuff, and Fright Night mostly offers carefully curated antique chills in a handsome package.

Trapped in the film like a genie in a bottle, a ghost in the Hollywood machine, is the wayward spirit of Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall), an old movie star whose current gig is as an aging host of a television show that reruns old horror pictures. Vincent’s role in this show is both spirit guide, a man attempting to reconnect us to decades-old films that society might otherwise be willing to leave as dead, exsanguinated husks, and funeral director, a man who is preparing these films for their life in a beyond where they may be forgotten. These movies, Fright Night suggests, are both society’s vampires, walking around looking for new blood to feast on and entertain, and its priests, lurking in the background, keeping the darkness at bay by reminding us of the presence of “evil” and the capacity to fight it. But this is a man who no longer believes in horror’s capacity to meditate on the soul of hope and the limits of despair. He has, the film continually remarks, no “faith.”

McDowall brings real pathos to the role of a warrior-poet from a bygone era working up the courage to wage war against metaphorical terrors new and old. When he finally gathers up the courage to enter the Dandridge house for the final battle, Holland bathes the house in metaphysical light and shadow suggestive of The Exorcist’s own meditations on the divine and the demonic. “Welcome to Fright Night,” Sarandon’s smarmy ghoul remarks, cannily figuring the finale as a haunted house movie, a smoke-and-mirror show of terror and fear. When he fights back, Vincent musters the vigor because, so far, “everything has worked like in the movies.” Horror cinema becomes a kind of prayer here, a manna from heaven reminding us of the world’s shadows and shedding light on them. Fright Night, finally, emerges as a steely, sensitive rumination on the necessity of the genre itself.

Sarandon seeds this themes in many ways, not all of them overtly religious. Jerry’s obvious desire to appeal to Charley’s girlfriend Amy (Amanda Bears) can’t disguise her ability to momentarily disarm him with her performatively sexual interest in him on the dance-floor. He seems unable to reckon with the fact that she might actually want him back, might find this cinematic figure’s otherworldly allure attractive. Yet the moment is deeply ambivalent. It initially suggests a kind of potency and strength for her, but when Holland cuts to their reflection in a mirror that depicts her floating in mid-air (Dandridge, naturally, can’t cast a reflection), it seems more like animated suspension. Without Jerry’s reflection, she seems to be dancing only with herself, trapped in a filmic haunted house world where cinema’s warped-mirror view of reality is able to reveal that what seems like agency for her may be, ultimately, one more form of entrapment.

And, despite its classicism, the film’s ability to draw blood from the ‘80s zeitgeist reflects its very timelessness. Fright Night isn’t always playing coy with the sexual concerns of its era, nor the vampire film’s much-beloved ability to refract the variations on desire and power that populate any particular decade. While Sarandon is all oily allure and devilish charisma, a walking poison pill who can destroy a woman with a stare, the film is alive to the pan-sexual nature of Jerry’s affection. This is first suggested in his ambiguous relationship with his passive, self-amused “roommate” Billy Cole (Jonathan Stark), but it is stretched furthest in his encounters with Charley’s friend Edward “Evil Ed” Thompson, imbued by Stephen Geoffreys with a legitimately otherworldly quality of overcompensating alienation.

In Evil Ed, a boy who is queer in an expansive, exploratory sense, the film’s subliminal sexual themes are both the most apparent and the most unformed. The film plays his coerced but also deeply willing turn to vampirism as a tragic resignation of the normal world’s failure to provide a space for him. It understands his eventual death as a distinctly penetrative act followed by a death throes that sounds quite like a sexual climax, an achievement of something society may have denied him. It isn’t exactly an unambiguous work of sexual liberation. The vampire is certainly a villain, not a mere antagonist, and he doesn’t exactly lead a utopian coven of otherworldly possibility. Horror’s reactive and retrograde and progressive and exploratory genes not only vie for supremacy but intermesh in a film that is both worried that something is slipping away from us and deeply, potently aware of currents that we haven’t even begun to properly empathize with. It also suggests that, in its queering of the world around it, horror restores a kind of faith in the possibility to confront that world and consider it anew.

Score: 7.5/10