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.