Original subtitles

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Welcome to the Peter Vincent Fright Fest

It's

(mumbling)

Yes, I'm fully aware of that.

Okay, reset

... and action!

Welcome to the story of Fright Fest.

Uh cut again Peter.

Fright night, not Fright Fest.

Welcome.

Welcome to the story of Fright Night.

With me,your illustrious host,Peter Vincent,

the great vampire killer that you have all come to love.

And in my eye, you have seen me do battle with them all.

Well, blood, sucking bags, and of course, the creatures of the night.

Come by.

Forbidden, frightfully glorious years, my victories

in fright's nights have illuminated your screens.

And yet, not unlike the creatures of the night, it remains as fresh

today as it did when first released to the big screen in 1985.

Who would have believed that a simple tale of blood and war penned by

Tom Holland could confound the critics to become the fangoriously free.

And in the brightening success, it remains to this day.

Few could have believed that much like myself, it would continue to

excite the imagination and cement itself as the camp cult classic of...

...excuse the pal, monstrous ploport.

So sit back, close the curtains, lock the door, turn

out the lights, and prepare for a night of frights.

With me, your host, Peter Vincent, the great vampire killer!

Fright Night is my love letter to the fans, because I was a fan when

I was a teenager back before there were horror movie fans certainly.

Stop! You creature of the night!

And I've been in a way kind of returns to the great conventions of the past.

Something that people were not really expecting at that time.

It taps into the primal scare.

I guess one of those stories that's timeless.

The movie is like getting on a roller coaster

and going up and down and it's just a lot of fun.

Okay, we mean business, this is a scary movie, and these people will kill you.

But you're going to have quite a few laughs along the way.

It had a certain eroticism and sensuality that I love.

Fright Night was kind of the culmination of some of the coolest makeup gags.

The master will kill you for this!

And physical effects that were done in the 80s.

It's always better to show the audience not quite enough,

and they often tend to remember more than they saw.

It very much captures that time as an era, but it doesn't make fun of it.

It embraces it.

Fright Night was a wonderful experience that blossomed beyond our imagination

in spite of the fact that we knew we were in an extraordinary adventure.

Traditional horror gone away, and what I wanted to do was

bring back the classic horror monsters that I grow enough with.

Welcome to...

...Fright Night.

For real.

...Fright Night.

...Fright Night.

...Fright Night.

Much like my own self, Tom Holland is a man of many talents, actor, writer, director,

book tour.

Born in New York in 1943, Tom went on to direct over 200 commercials, before penning

such classic films as Class of 1984 in 1982 and psycho two just a year later.

Psycho 2 was an enormous commercial success

and that wasn't even a feature film when I went

to work on it.

It was a cable movie and I had to write a

great script to get Tony Perkins to say yes and

it was when the word went out around the world

that Tony was reprieising Norman Bates that

all of a sudden there was such interest.

The universal finally went, hey, maybe we have a feature film here.

It was like Iron Balls excuse me, yeah.

But he did and it's now revered as one of the great sequels of all time.

The idea for Fright night happened while I was writing Cloak and Dagger.

Cloak and Dagger was ostensibly a remake of the window.

The 1948 movie which was the juvenile version of a rear window.

But while I was writing that and working on it, out of nowhere.

This idea came to me and I thought well

wouldn't it be wonderful if an horror movie fan

hi there that's me, became convinced that his next door neighbor was a vampire.

And I thought that was just the funniest idea I'd ever had.

Just by virtue of the name, Fright Night.

There's going to be some Fright going on tonight.

I had a premise that I didn't have a story and I kept saying to myself, well if I was

that kid which of course you know it's a wish fulfillment story, I would have loved

to have been Charlie Brewster.

But I said if I was that kid what would I do?

Who would I go to for help because nobody would believe you.

That was what made it so funny.

You're guilty anyway because everybody knows the you're a horror movie fanatic.

And then I thought of Peter Vincent which was Peter Cushing and Vincent Price.

My two favorite actors when I was growing up,

the minute that I had that image in my head

I couldn't wait to get home and start writing.

Stop you creature of the night.

And I wrote a first draft in that non-stop

24-7 in about three weeks and then I finished

it and I put it aside.

And I said things missing, something's missing.

What the hell is missing?

And I came to a stop and there's no girl in it.

And I wrote the first draft, there was no Amy.

I mean the story was so strong that it carried

me through with like three or four boys friends.

And so then I went back and I started to work

it again and I wrote Amy into it and it fell

into place and it locked.

Me too.

I'm just scared that's all.

They wanted to give him a bunch of money to just write it and not direct it.

And he had this real conflict and he said no, I'm going to direct it.

It was really an important decision in his life.

I had the chops because I was hot enough as a writer to be able to leverage myself into

directing because of Psycho 2.

It was a terrific guy at Columbia that had a story department called John Byers.

And John supported me.

As far as I know, the first time that Tom ever

said action in a feature film as a director

was to me.

So as a friend, that was fun.

Better to have friends around you, you know, when you're getting into this thing.

And I went down and I shot.

I wanted to get the humor out of shooting this terrible horror film.

When the movie first struck you think, oh baby, this is the movie.

Why are you looking at me so strangely, Nina?

Not you, Jonathan.

You're a neck.

And then it panms back and you see that the leads are watching the movie.

I hear my breast.

We were trying to be terrible.

Tacky, like all these horror films would grow enough with as a kid.

I mean, if you look carefully, Peter Vinson is in the film, staking the vampire, he has

the stake upside down.

He was directing it like a silent movie.

Slowly turned to the right pop.

Look, what do you see?

It's horrifying.

And so there was this whole, you know, and the more we did that, the more fun it was.

And it was sort of a nice little job where I got to kiss a girl for about seven hours.

And so, you know, how bad can that be?

When I met Tom for the first time, I was kind of surprised.

You know, here's this good looking guy, you know, he'd been an actor before.

What's her problem?

I don't know.

Make the way.

You actually wrote this script.

She finally find out what you really like.

Plus off evil.

He had so much passion put into this movie, and it showed.

Fright Night was the throwaway of Columbia.

It was the last open slot they had on their schedule.

It was their least expensive movie.

It was a genre movie.

Maybe they'd make a little money off it, but they didn't expect anything out of it.

There are a number of elements to Fright Night that contribute it to its success.

But first and foremost, it's on the page.

It's Tom Holland's script.

It stands the test of time because it was

his love story to the folklore of the vampire

world, the vampire lore.

I mean, you're not going to believe this.

It's stumbling on to an innocent situation

that should not be going in the direction that

it's going.

We're taking out the window, seeing a guy

next door, bringing a casket out of the house,

witnessing something that no one believes and

being the only person with that information,

which I guess is a rear window.

Charlie?

This is our next door neighbor, Jerry Dandridge.

Hello, Charlie?

Fright Night is both an homage to the

vampire genre and also a revitalization of it.

In the sense that by the time we were shooting

this movie, Vampire's genre had grown rather

tired.

In fact, it was being satirized.

There were a number of movies out that made

fun of it and really didn't have that element

of terror and at the same time sort of adhering

to the conventions and along comes a guy named

Tom Holland who loved the genre and decided that

he wanted to create a movie that both terrified

and major laughs.

It's a loving tribute.

It's not take off on anything.

It's a real story.

It takes what's been done in the past and

expands on it and says the audience, here you

go, here's your gift.

You know, enjoy it because we're having fun doing it.

I would write a scene and I would be on the floor laughing.

I mean, I would be kicking my legs in the air.

Because it was delightful.

I mean, I would have loved to have had that happen to me.

Mom, I don't need hot cocoa.

I didn't have a nightmare.

You know, I mean, who wouldn't have been in modern times who wouldn't like to have to

go into a battle as a teenager with a vampire?

A what?

A vampire?

Damn it.

Haven't you listened to anything I've said?

They gave me this brilliant production

designer and his son as the duo of John DeCure

Senior and John DeCure Junior.

And John DeCure Junior is the one who did all the work on Fright Night.

But he had been trained by his father who

was one of the top three production designers

in Hollywood, all of them Cleopatra on.

He had been Darryl Echzaniq's guy.

They always say that we bring in designers very early in the process because it takes

them so long to build their sets.

That may be true, but it also allows us a lot

of time with our director in storyboarding

and really getting inside their heads.

Tom extensively storyboarded with his own hand, unfortunately.

You know, some, you know, the storyboards

were the homie, but at least it was, you know,

however crude they were, they really kind of helped me and I think a lot of the other

people who were working with him to understand

where he was thinking, where he was going and

what he wanted to accomplish.

I have a great deal of affection for the

vampire myth, for the genre and the genre died

out because they couldn't update it.

And I wanted to bring it back and this was the first story that really contemporized

it and they gave it validity in today's climate.

But as soon as I read the script, I was like, this is great.

You know, I said the time, whoever you

hire, this is going to be a wonderful movie.

You know, I worked on Spinal Tap, which was a non-union picture and some other, you

know, love budget movies.

And because of the way the union was in those

days, there was a seniority system and it

wasn't qualified to cut it.

So I knew this going into interview, but I was like, what the hell?

I'm going to interview anyway because I love the script so much.

And then when I got the call to edit the movie, I was like, hmm, okay.

And I never really questioned how I got hired.

I went in to talk to the head of Plus Production

at Columbia and only said was, I hope you

know how lucky you are.

And I was like, guess I do.

Jerry Dandridge is everything that, you know, you want an vampire.

Sophisticated, swav, elegant, got great taste.

Now that I've been made welcome, I'll probably drop by quite a bit.

I'm not a cop.

Anytime I feel like it.

Too faced.

Psychotic.

A lot of people were suggested, but nobody had a combination of coolness with menace.

He's a very charming, witty, devil-made care kind of happy-go-lucky.

Undead.

Vampire.

In a sort of classic way, I was sent the script by my agent.

And I looked at the cover, I looked at the name, Fright Night.

And of course at the time I was doing Hallmark

Hall of Fame and I was playing Sidney Carton

and Charles Donet and Taylor to cities.

And I was doing theater in New York and I'd gotten an Academy Award nomination.

I thought, Jesus, you know, I can't do a movie called Fright Night.

And then I opened the script and I started

reading it and within maybe 10 seconds I was

sucked in.

Tom has a very evocative way of writing and

also he writes in a way that lets you see the

movie.

The one thing that Chris brought to it was humor.

It's mad at Charlie.

Fright I'd never come over without being invited first.

Everybody who encountered him was one over a vion, which is really dangerous.

I just remember that smile.

All you have to do is take my hand.

Yeah, I know Evelyn fell for it and I probably would too.

I've watched him play leading men with a

character edge and that's what he brought to Jerry

Dandridge.

What vampires are supposed to do, Charlie?

I finished reading the script and I turned to

my ex-wife and I said, Jesus, this is really

good.

They want to meet me.

What do you think?

She said, well, what the hell?

We set up a meeting, flew out to Los Angeles

as I recall and met with her, Jeffy and Tom.

Tom proceeded to sit there and describe every shot of the movie to me.

Literally he said, okay, so we're going to open on this and then that shot is going to

cut to this and then this is going to happen and that's going to happen.

I'm sitting there and I'm seeing the movie as Tom is describing it.

Drew him in, but he was afraid of working with the first time director and I had to

sell him on me.

I said this guy knows what he's doing and

immediately I said literally to them, call my

agent and let's do this.

I mean, literally from that two or three hour

meeting I was in and that was the beginning.

And at a single stroke that was a brilliant, brilliant bit of casting.

Charlie's the engine that makes it go because

Charlie's the one who's most motivated.

He's the one who sees Jerry Dandridge at night into the house next door.

So he's the one that's on purpose.

Oh my goodness, there's a vampire living next door.

He was living with his mom, father was divorced.

It was pretty traumatic and I wanted to stand up

and be the man of the house and be responsible

and not disappoint anybody.

I had a couple of friends.

I had this little sort of dark, narrow band width in my spectrum, I guess.

And that's what made me friends with Ed.

I had a very nice girlfriend.

It was just the boy next door.

Literally the boy next door.

Ed Thompson didn't have many friends.

If just that one friend, Charlie Brewster.

So aside from the scenes that are shown in

the movie, I really feel that these two guys

were buddies and pals and loved each other.

I saw a tremendous number of actors at a wonderful casting director Jackie Birch.

And I remember one of them was Charlie Sheen as a young guy and Charlie came in.

And I said, you're too good looking.

You're too handsome, you're a lead.

And he was very upset with me.

I should not have done it.

I should have just let him read and let it go after that.

But I was looking for somebody that was attractive,

but that you could believe was the nice kid.

It was a little special, but not that special, you know?

I was in acting school in San Francisco in Berkeley actually.

And I was about to graduate and I got a call from

the head of the school who said that a casting person

in San Francisco across the bay was looking for actors to play a part in this movie.

And the movie was Mask that Peter and Big Donovich.

They were looking for boys who were kind of sickly and feeble.

And I was thin in those days.

And the woman casting it was a woman named Jackie Birch.

Met with Peter Donovich.

She did an audition for him and didn't get that role.

But then a few months later when I was coming

down to visit, I called Jackie and said,

you know, I'd like to take you to lunch.

And she said, no, she, but why don't you

come and read for this other thing I'm doing.

You might be right for it.

So I came down and I read for a fright night.

Then went back and forth from San Francisco to LA for a

couple of months doing that auditioning and finally got it.

Bill Ragsdale came in and just did a wonderful, wonderful reading.

And he was Charlie.

He's basically a nice guy.

He's very fond of cars and he spends a lot of time working on cars.

And he's grown up in the small Iowa town.

He knows a lot of people.

He's got a girlfriend, an Amy Peterson.

Bill was this lovely guy.

I have deep affection for him.

We had a connection right away.

Terrible actor.

Billy Ragsdale himself, terrible.

That's a lie.

We have fun.

I was just bullying him the whole time.

No matter what you see, every single time all I'm doing is bullying him.

Hey, kid.

It was great and it was fun, you know.

What are you doing?

It's just like, hey, fuck you, man. I'm a dick.

Our first day of shooting was the high school

scene where I smashed the burger in his face.

Charlie?

So it was nice to sort of start out with like more

casual scene as opposed to just being in the bedroom.

And taking off my clothes and trying to

seduce him, which was pretty pathetic attempt.

Charlie?

I'm ready.

He's a really good kisser.

I'm not just saying that.

He's a really good kisser.

And that helps when you have to do those scenes a few times.

Mm.

Mm.

Mm.

Mm.

The real problem I had was finding Amy.

Because I needed not only a love interest in the

girl next door, but I needed somebody could also

do a very subtle comedy with it.

I don't understand you.

First you want to make love and then you don't.

The horror, the humor, everything comes out of real emotions, relationships,

and behavior that are truthful and honest like everyday people.

Amy's the girl next door.

She's in love with the boy next door who happens to live next door to a monster.

Well, good night, Charlie.

Hey, good night.

But she's just so focused on Charlie.

And I think young women in high school age, that's

a very real part of that time in their lives.

The girl of my dreams, the sweet, innocent girl that I wanted to be with.

Amanda Burst came in and she got the grin.

She got the amusement underneath the situations.

When I was auditioning, I was sitting with real

16 and 17 year olds and I'm 26 at the time.

And I'm looking around going, okay, I know I look a

little younger than my age, but this is ridiculous.

However, because of the arc of the character, how it's written for her, she

has to go through a deepening, sort of sexual, very matureing experience

once she gets involved with Chris Seranna's character.

The girl who desperately wants to grow up and then has to grow up too fast.

I went off to do the spectacular film before Fright

night that actually starred Stephen Jeffries.

Lay Reverend Rantel.

What?

I'm being facetious.

Spectacular.

When Stephen and I were rapping for Trinity

Vacation, it was like, what are you going to do next?

Well, I'm doing this whole film, this horror

film called Fright Night and I was like, me too.

And it was just, wow, cool, we're going to work with each other again.

And there were really two incredibly different experiences.

In this business, there's luck, there's talent.

And in this case, luck played a big part.

I was accidentally sent to an audition.

My agent just kind of goofed up and I went in and I met Jackie Burst.

She says, you're not Anthony Michael Hall.

Are your parents aware of this?

I'm like, well, no, I'm not.

I remember reading this acting book that says, you know,

anytime you're in a situation, you got to take advantage of it.

And I was like, well, I'm with this casting director from Columbia Pictures.

So I really took advantage of the fact that I was sitting

on the other side of the desk with this great lady.

And we talked for, I think, 20, 30 minutes, even though I wasn't

the person that she had any intention of casting for this movie.

But from that mistaken encounter, she remembered

me when she got the breakdown for Fright night.

He thought he was going to be auditioning for Charlie Brewster.

He thought he was going to be the leading guy

again like he was in the film we were in together.

You know, I had never played this kind of strange,

weird sort of off-be-character like Evil Ed.

And it really took me a while to process that and to wrap my mind around it.

What do you see in me that bears any similarity to this really kooky?

She's got the hots for the creep Amy.

Somewhat obnoxious character.

When Steven Jeffries walked in, Steven's choices as an actor were so out there.

And he had this.

Both of them had their heads chopped off.

Can you believe it?

You're sick.

You know, I mean, there were so outrageous that I just loved him.

Evil Ed.

He was the kid in school that everybody thought was weird.

He was the one that wasn't in the cool group.

Start with this.

But you must have total faith in it for it to work.

He was the quintessential horror fan to me.

Then get some garlic.

Links to the stuff you can wear around your neck and hang from your window.

If he comes for you, that'll be the way.

You know, he was the kind of guys that I'd grown up with that got into horror,

but were never invited to the parties.

And certainly didn't make it to the football game.

What are we going to do?

This is just like Fright night.

The character of Evil Ed was so ostracized.

Steven had his way of working, which was to kind

of go off and be by himself a lot of the time.

It's like we're Steven.

I don't know.

We're Steven.

Anybody know where Steven went?

You know, and it worked because of the strain of a guy trying to fit in.

Evil Ed is in many ways.

He is a lost boy, a young man who feels that he has no place in the world

and covers it by being manic and crazy.

He is Thanos in the oven.

Your dinner is in the oven.

I mean, who could do a reading like that?

I used to play these nice, innocent, sweet guys or whatever.

Although he is very gentle.

I mean, I'm just very strange.

I'm weird in the movie.

Yes.

The humor, not comedy, but the humor, had to come

out of playing the reality of the situations.

Jonathan Stark was a member of the groundlings,

which was like the first comedy improv group.

So I get a call to come in and read for this thing.

And I got the sides.

I read them.

It was basically the scene I did with Art Evans and Bill Ragsdale.

That was a scene I had auditioned with.

You sure about this?

The agent sent me out for an audition for a film called, what's it called?

Fright Night.

Okay, it's not like a horror film.

It says it is.

So I get there about 20 minutes early.

There's a bunch of guys there.

And then the next thing I know, and hour later, we're all still there.

So this is it.

I said, I'm out of here.

I can't believe this.

And nobody's going in.

Talking to this guy, we were hanging out.

I said, look, I'm getting ready to bust a move, man.

Because I got another appointment to make.

And I don't want to be late.

He says, Art.

I said, what?

He says, I don't think you want to leave.

Why?

He said, just look around.

So I started looking around.

I'm the only black guy there.

Lieutenant Inx, homicide.

Mind if we come in?

No.

No, not at all, come on in.

It's the first time I bring an outsider in to try and intervene in this situation.

There was a murder last night.

Charlie lives next door.

I think he saw the victim in this house.

And it's also the first time that the vampire really

realizes that I'm not going to stop until he's exposed.

Look, I can prove he's lying.

Let's look in the basement and stand.

What's done there, Charlie?

Yes, Charlie.

What's done?

I never look at it part that you're getting a film as a small part.

Because I can make something out of it.

A coffin!

That's what's down there.

A coffin.

I saw them carried in.

What?

That scene was fun for me because I was doing stuff that wasn't in the script.

Art and I are just like, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum.

And it's really felt so natural when we did it.

Ooh!

Ha, ha, ha!

I'm doing all those faces and stuff, but it was like, gosh, that's weird.

Uh-oh.

I saw him in that room last night.

He had fangs and he bit her on the neck.

For heavens sake, come on.

I thought my character was very pivotal in moving the film forward.

I think he only worked two days on the film and

it's a real turning point in the movie, too.

Look, I'm telling you, Jerry Dandridge is a vampire.

Sure, and I'm dirty here.

Now, let me tell you something here.

If I ever catch your ass down at the station

house again, I'm throwing it in jail.

Whatever!

Look, Lieutenant, please, come on.

Just listen to me for a second.

Look, I know it's crazy.

I know that, but look, Lieutenant!

Well, he's always got Jerry's back.

Two guys who are very aware of their power.

They know what they have to do and they go about

doing it in a very kind of almost business-like way.

You never quite know what their relationship is.

I know there's a lot of speculation and stuff.

What the relationship, real relationship, was between Billy Cole and Jerry.

I'm not going to speculate on that because we never really talked about it.

We didn't make a decision, oh, well, they were at some point back when

centuries before lovers or close friends or that Jerry turned him into...

We didn't really get into that.

People ask me sometimes about the homosexual element.

We never discussed that.

Ever.

It just that we were really good friends and we took care of each other.

And then there's a scene where I'm washing Chris's hand.

And Tom says, we'll get down to the news in federal.

Oh, okay.

Whatever. You know, I'm the servant. I'm subservient, so I'll do that.

So afterwards I watched a movie and I was like, wait a minute.

You fooled me, Tom.

Everybody's going to write their own story and then

bother me one way or another what they want to think.

Which makes it all the more intriguing because you

want to find out what's going on with these two dudes.

Heidi Sorenson was just beautiful.

He got out of the car and of course she was the

victim of, you know, going into Jerry's house.

Obviously an escort service.

Charlie notices Ernie's wild buyer.

Is this 99 Oak?

No. I know it's next door.

Well, I wanted to get a little bit more sexiness and I

thought that if I could get the nipples a little bit harder,

that would certainly get Charlie's attention that would get mine.

Hot. Very hot.

And of course the way you do that is use a little bit of ice.

I was too embarrassed to ask Heidi directly.

So I asked the wardrobe woman to ask Heidi for me.

I don't know if I'd be any better at asking now.

Hey mom.

Yeah, I'm in here.

This is shout out to Dorothy Fielding who played mom.

Did you see the new guy next door yet?

No, but I did hear he's got a live in carpenter.

My luck is probably good.

She was a very strong actress who once again could be funny.

She could act and play Ditsy.

Charlie, what is going on?

Oh, nothing. I just had a nightmare.

You know, I had one last night. It was awful.

I was at this white sale and I suddenly realized I was stark naked.

I mean, she's a hoot. You can get that, too.

You can get that in those brief moments that she's in the scene.

Are you kids having a lover's spat?

No, mom, nothing like that.

Well, there's nothing wrong with it.

It says right here that the divorce rate is 76%

higher among couples who don't argue before marriage.

Mom, we're in high school.

And she had this sort of bubbly, unexpected kind of goofiness.

Charlie?

Dorothy, wherever you are, we all love you.

We send you our best.

And nobody knows where she is.

She dropped out of sight.

Born in the dark, cobbled streets of London town, England in 1928.

The character actor, Rodi McDowell, would start his career as a child in 1938.

He would fast become a recognizable face in such

films as Lassie Cleopatra, the Poseidon adventure.

And, most memorably, the planet of the ape saga playing talking chimps.

When casting the role of Peter Vincent, Tom Holland would be

drawn to Rodi because of the work they did in class of 1984.

The heart of the show is Peter Vincent.

And I wanted Vincent Price because I'd grown up

with Vincent Price and he was my horror hero.

And I found out that his health was not good, so that wasn't possible.

And then I thought of Rodi McDowell.

He understood who Peter Vincent was.

And I had faith in him because I'd seen him do it.

Peter Vincent is the cowardly lion.

As Rodi said to me, so it's the story of a terrible ham actor.

If his Peter Vincent back once more with you, as who's upright like me.

He is appearing on the midnight shows presenting

these features that he made when he was a youth.

There are a lot of people who do not believe in vampires.

But I do because I know they exist.

And he's a very, very bad actor. He's a terrible, terrible actor.

Mr. Vincent, could I talk to you for a minute?

Please, Mr. Vincent, it's very, very important what you want me to sign.

Pardon me? Wouldn't do what my autographed own children.

I don't think he's as hammy as he thinks he is. He's, well, he's a little hammy.

I was curious about what you said last night

on TV, you know, about believing in vampires.

What about it? Were you serious?

Absolutely.

The young man in the film comes to him.

I believe in vampires.

He sort of takes him seriously in the sense that he

has played a character called the vampire killer.

And the young man comes to him because there is a vampire living next door to him.

In fact, I have one living next door to me.

Would you help me kill him?

I believe in vampires.

In fact, I have one living next door to me. Would you help me kill him?

If this is your idea of a joke, I am not amused.

Peter Vincent then finds out it's real that there are vampires.

We need your help to stop him, Mr. Vincent.

He really just believes his next door neighbors

a vampire and he's planning to kill him.

You know, he's an old school actor. He's the performer, the Thessian, you know.

Now, the business where is the lair of this suspected creature of the night?

There.

Oh, yes, I see what you mean.

You know, he's chewing the scenery up, of course.

Hey, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Where's your stakes in hammer?

Or I left them in my bag.

You're not going in there without him.

But I have to prove that he is a vampire before I kill him, Charlie.

And he finds out not only that it's real,

but that these young people, these teens that he

really actually likes are in terrible mortal danger.

That goes to you too, Ed.

I expect we have a lot of the same interests,

you know, in horror movies and occult.

When he found out that Jerry D'Angers was really a vampire,

he said, you have to find me out of here.

What's wrong with you? Nothing.

But then would find it somehow within him to rise to the moment.

And he overcomes his own fears, his own cowardice.

You're a teacher of Vincent, ready to do battle with the undead.

Roddy was a great mentor and a great friend.

He was completely approachable and accessible, you know.

And I had grown up watching him in the television and films my whole life.

And I was really thrilled to be able to work with him.

He was always there, and I'm thinking, look at him going, you know,

compared to the rest of us, you're a pretty big star.

And you can ask and do whatever you want.

But he was just one of us.

Roddy had two dinner parties a week.

He had a Wednesday night dinner party for straight people.

And he had a Friday night dinner party for gay people.

I was invited to the straight nights.

But I mean, I ended up in Roddy's having dinner

with Vincent Price and his wife, Coral Brown.

And I was such an idiot. I don't know why I didn't get autographs.

Roddy's Peter Vincent, to me is again a perfect piece of casting.

Back spawn of Satan.

Interestingly, because in a way, Roddy, at that point in his career,

wasn't doing a lot of films. He was doing, he

was working, but he wasn't doing a lot of films.

And he understood, I think, who Peter Vincent was, the fear of losing the career.

I suppose I think success means if you can keep working

on a level of sound respectability and invention.

I remember watching Roddy do a wardrobe test, because

they were trying to get the look right of Peter Vincent.

But he was playing this B movie actor. And Roddy said, it's largely me.

And that I was so struck by.

Every child perform as a different group of hurdles to overcome.

I don't think it's easy for an adult either to overcome their initial success.

You know, a legend and an icon.

He was a walking history book of film and of Hollywood.

And before anybody else was into it that I knew, he was

building up an enormous collection of films in 35 and 16 mil.

Whenever I needed a film because I wanted to research

something and I couldn't find it anywhere, I'd go to Roddy.

And ask him, and he almost always had these obscure films and he had the 35 mil prints.

I miss him a lot. And it's too bad he's not

here because he would love all of this stuff.

You know, he was the grand historian as well

as being a really good actor and person.

So it's our loss.

He was an extraordinary friend. Toward the end

as well. When he was dying, he had friends over.

We would sit around and talk, have a glass of wine. He would be impeccably dressed.

He was an amazing guy. Roddy McDowell, God bless you.

Having given the cast the luxury of two weeks of rehearsal time prior to filming,

Tom Holland would allow his actors to develop their

own characters creating their own backstories.

I had them write up biographies for each of their characters and their

relationships with the other actors that happened before the movie began.

We sat around for several days. We talked about the characters.

We did probably five or six pages just on our history together. I

mean, I think we were together 800 years or something like that.

Well, I had them create all of that in their own heads

and whatever their choices were, it didn't matter.

Once we started acting, we could let it all go. But they

had it in their heads when they'd met the first time.

When Charlie and Evelyn first got into horror

films, all of that background was at it.

I rather arrogantly said, oh, I don't need to write a history.

And everyone was kind of shocked. And then I went to my hotel that night and

I got a call from my agent that said, Steve, Tom is kind of worried about you.

You know, almost to the point that, you know, he wasn't sure if I

could do it because I didn't write the suggested character history.

When I got finished reading my bio, it looked like

gone with the wind. That's great. That's such a out.

Mine, as I can recall, was relationship oriented with Charlie of our history,

how we knew each other, where we met, when we started dating, that sort of thing.

I had a couple of ideas that he loved that we used in the

movie, this, in my research. How do you research a vampire?

So I read a lot about vampire lore, but I also read about bats. Because

I figured, well, you know, that's the genealogy of the vampire world.

At some point, back in the very beginning,

the first vampire was bitten by a vampire bat.

So I started researching bats and I discovered that 910s somewhere in that

range of all the bats in the world are not vampire bats. They're fruit bats.

I thought, well, that's kind of interesting. What would be interesting

to have in somewhere in Jerry's genealogy, an urge to eat fruit?

So I brought it up to Tom and he said, oh, that's great. Let's

try some. And so we kind of laced it throughout the movie.

The Gothic Association with the Vampire is a classic and an established association.

What was difficult was finding that house in juxtaposition to Charlie's house.

Charlie's house was, and needed to be, a much

more suburban, traditional, two-story residence.

The Victorian house was built on the back lot of Disney. As serendipity

would have it, the little suburban house was sitting right there next to it.

Now this was after weeks and weeks of location

scouting and traveling all over Los Angeles.

The

first one on the set at the Disney live and saw this house and

I was like, oh my god, this is amazing. It looks really scary.

We shot at the layered studios in Culver City, which were the

original ints studios. And it's where they shot gone with the wind.

So it was very storied and historic and it was great to be on that set.

Very important to keep levity on the set when you're doing a hard one.

Most of the memories I have in the movie are shooting at layered and smoke.

Smoke, smoke, smoke, jam, keys are walking around pumping the smoke onto the set.

John DeCure, our production designer, was very communicative and understood my needs

in lighting and being able to move cameras and have the space and ability to do that.

We worked pretty hard to create looks inside that

house that were not only Victorian consistent

but allowed him to perform some of the magic

that I think makes the film as exciting as it is.

We built this rather grand staircase. It really gave Tom the opportunity to

choreograph the scenes and the action and the special effects that were required.

The schoolhouse was next door to Charlie's house.

It was actually a church originally. And Tom

said, yeah, I don't think they'd moved that

close to a church so they changed it to a school.

Peter being the television host had a sort

of a Hollywood-esque sense to his character.

So we looked at the classic Hollywood courtyard apartment because we wanted

to sell the Hollywood notion of Peter being the guy that worked in television.

I really was happy to hear that Tom wanted to shoot

Animorphic because that's one of my favorite formats.

Wow.

Especially on a smaller budget, it gives a

greater opportunity for three-dimensionality.

Because there's that more restrained depth of field and it's going to be more

specific, it helps the eye kind of drift off into the abstract of the sets.

There is no campiness in this. I would not

show disrespect for the genre by parroting it.

I could just totally trust and depend on Tom to guide me in the right direction.

His approach to the work is somewhat cerebral but just very authentic.

Tom put his hand on my shoulder so I'd knock this hand off.

Because I'm a police officer and it just meant

respect for the position representing the law.

What are you talking about?

I will make your ass have some respect after I go through your ass like X-Laks.

There was just this real genuine sense of everybody on the set.

Nobody was bringing any attitude.

And Chris Sarandon and Rodney McDowell would be the ones I guess

to be the divas, although I think Billy Ragsel really is prone.

But no, kidding.

Not.

Tom was very passionate, very involved and knew every

single aspect about what the lighting was going to

look like, what the shot was going to look like, what

the movement in the frame was going to look like.

I did make the mistake one time we were shooting in an alley and we had

gotten to the end of the alley and there was really no where else to go.

So I sort of jokingly said cut and he did not think that was my job to call cut.

And he let me know that, you know, sort of in front of everybody and I got it.

And I never did it again.

Ahhhhhhhhhh!

Shooting in the alleyway at night where Evil Ed fakes being attacked.

I warned him! He got me Charlie! He bit me!

You know what you're going to have to do now, don't you?

Keep on me. Kill me Charlie before I turn into a vampire and give your HIKI!

HIKI!

HIKI!

HIKI!

You asshole!

It was late at night, the middle of the night in

a downtown alley and people were throwing things,

like literally throwing garbage cans at us and trash

and stuff as we were filming throughout the night.

Not funny!

I gave it a grittiness that we didn't expect, I guess.

Charlie, Amy, is that you?

If that's you, it's not working, I'm not scared.

When I was in the alley with Chris, you

know, obviously it was a life-changing event.

Hello, everyone.

The scene in the alley is so poignant.

It don't have to be afraid of me.

Because it is the dying cry of a young man who says, please help

me and is willing to give up his soul in order to be somebody.

I know what it's like being different.

They won't pick on you anymore.

And Tom's take on it too is that Jerry is not ravenous in that moment. He's tender.

All you have to do is take my hand.

It's not Jerry licking his chops and saying, okay, another victim.

Take my hand.

It just was so intriguing for him to think, wow, I mean I

could live this fantasy that I've been pretending to be.

It's Jerry essentially saying to him, you know what?

Nobody's ever going to make fun of you again.

I'm going to see you then.

And that's an extraordinarily human connection

that's made in a scene that could be horrifying.

It was a Christmas Eve and we had done all the exterior stuff, all the location stuff.

And so it moved inside and we were about to break for a holiday.

There's a scene where I run down the staircase

to say hi to my mom after she's called me down.

So I'm supposed to just sort of glide down the stairs, sort of carefree.

And I did that a few times.

And I said, can you do it faster? Like an idiot.

We had it in the can but we're going to do it one

more time to see if we can get it a little faster.

And when it came down the stairs, I slipped and fell and I sprained my foot.

So it was starting to swell and they said, well,

you know, let's get to my son and let's wrap it up.

And the sound man came over and said, it's not a sprain, it's a break.

Because he could hear the snap on his headphones, I guess.

So they went back and listened to it and said, yeah, let's get him to the hospital.

So I did the rest of the movie with a broken foot.

And a lot of the interior scenes where I sort of run

out of frame, I'm actually kind of falling out of frame.

If you watch it, you can sort of see me kind of go down as I make my escape.

They had a teamster there, a big guy who would catch me.

Cut, then we'd start over.

They had to access their insurance coverage

to sort of extend the shooting because of it.

So I went to the doctor to get my checkup, my osteopath.

And he said, so slow them down.

And I was a movie set. I had never been on one really.

I said, well, you know, I wait for them. Mostly, I just wait for them to set up.

And then I do my thing.

That apparently got back to the producers and to the insurance company.

And the insurance company and the producers started having a difference

of opinion about how much my injury was adding to the shoot dates.

So that became an issue only because one of the producers would follow me around.

It would be behind a set, you know, or by a car, by the catering or something.

And when I wasn't aware, he would say, $100,000.

That's what you cost me every day, $100,000.

And I was a kid, you know, so I felt like that was...

I thought it was a little weird at the time and I think it was pretty lousy now.

So that's a fun story.

The first scene that I filmed that laugh, I kind of didn't want to do it.

And I was trying to weasel my way around doing it

because I just didn't feel comfortable with it.

And then as soon as the first take happened and Tom

just rushed up to me and said, Steve, just trust me.

This laugh is a vital aspect of evil ed.

You've got to do it.

So I dug deep and you know, invented this cackle that turned into this evil ed laugh.

Yeah, I can't do it. You're so cool, Brewster, what are you reading?

Oh, you're so cool, Brewster.

I can't stand it.

The special effects mastery on Fright night not only enhanced the film,

but also added a sense of realism to its terrific scenes.

The effects team headed by Richard Edland did such a

marvelous job that even I, on more than one occasion,

skipped a heartbeat or two.

This is a state of the art special effects film

in terms of prosthetics, make up, optical effects,

and even in terms of the camera design, the shot design of the film.

The best that was available in terms of today's technology

to make the effects work are involved in this film.

They gave me Richard Edland and this brilliant crew Randy and Steve Johnson.

It's just wonderful, wonderful people can

de-ass. They're just talented, talented crew.

You would ask everyone in our department, do you like vampire movies?

What would you like to see in a vampire movie? What

would make a vampire movie more special to you?

I think you really respected the opinion of a lot of

the different crafts that were working on his movie.

We were all kids and we were just making the stuff up,

we went along, and we had this incredible play around.

All we had to do was go in there and make the best

bunch as we could, and that was absolutely fine.

And there was a lot of cooking.

Fright night was practical effects. It was puppets,

it was rubber, it was in your face, it was on sale.

It's sort of like fighting a war. You know, you go

into the battlefield with whatever armaments you have,

and you got to make do with whatever you got

against the enemy, which is time and money.

The only thing visually is possible. If you can think about it

and talk about it, then you can usually draw a picture of it.

If you can do that, then you can figure out a way of visualizing it until...

Gary Martin, who was the president of Physical Protection

at Columbia, said, you got to do me a favor on this one,

because we only got X amount of dollars to do this

movie, and I think we had enough money to do 30 shots.

Richard called up Rick Baker and said, hey, I've got this show called Ghost Busters,

just opened this huge studio. Would you

like to be involved? And Rick said, hell no.

I just got back from here in England, I want to take a break,

and so he goes, but I'll introduce you to Steve Johnson,

which was the perfect way for Rick to get rid of me.

So I went down a map richer than it was really strange,

because they didn't know I was an 18-year-old kid.

And the movie was Ghost Busters, and they didn't really trust me,

so they had me do a test. They had me do the zombie cab driver.

So I just had two weeks to do what I built it in my bedroom.

He was a very handsome guy, and charismatic, and very talented.

Somebody caught him screwing one of the grou-

on the table, in the barber room.

And if you go into this room, you know, the fumes, you know, you think

about these guys, and what's happening to their brains, you know,

because they're dealing with these strange fumes all the time.

He really loves what he does. He's like this mad

scientist, and with sort of a maniacal look in his eyes,

while he's putting all this stuff on you.

When you were down to the last minute and trying to get the stuff on to set,

there was Steve saying, you know, it's just got

to be one better. It's got to be one better.

It's not in front of the camera yet. It's got to be one better.

Steve Johnson and I sort of squabbled over who

was going to get what piece of the pie, you know?

And I lost a few and won a few, you know?

Steven and Randy were really the kind of creative team.

A lot of really good people, those real kind of dream team.

They got asked to come to this meeting.

Tom really liked my work, and he said, I want

you to be the lead makeup artist on this.

I want you to do the prosthetics and apply them on the set.

I remember Randy Cook sitting on the other side of the table at one point,

because he's talking about how he wants

Chris to have multiple stages of the makeup.

And Randy's looking at me and kind of malting to me.

What do you want to do the final stage? Let me do the final stage.

And I'm like, okay, you know, that actually happened.

Randy probably throw rocks at me for that, but it's true.

Then I said, look guys, this is great. I'm very flattered.

I think it's really nice you want me to do this, but I can't do it.

Tom says, what do you mean you can't do it? I said, I'm not group one.

Well, in those days, in the makeup artist union, you

had to get a certain amount of days working on films

that you could only get if there was no one else to call on in the list on the union.

And I explained all this to him.

And Jerry Barrow, they're looking at me, he says,

Steve, I'm very good friends of Howard Smith.

Now Howard Smith was the president of the makeup artist union at the time.

And he says, I can work this out. So he gets the phone.

He calls it right there. It's just like something out of a Woody Allen movie.

And he's on the phone. He's saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's bear Jerry Barrow.

It's your, I got this guy here, Steve.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Huh? What?

Yeah, well, Tom wants him to do the film. Here's the phone.

So what? Howard wants to talk to you.

So I get on the phone. I talk to Howard.

Howard said, hey, Steve, don't worry about a thing. I got this handle.

I said, well, I'm not group one. It's just that's okay.

We're going to overlook that.

And you're going to do this job because, you know, they want you and all this stuff.

And I said, okay, I got a really bad feeling about this.

But okay, the first day of shooting comes up.

Down there on the set, I'm in the makeup trailers. Rottie.

I start to make them up. I get as far as getting the prosthetic, ludus forehead.

And the trailer door kicks open.

And Howard Smith comes in. And he said, stop right now.

You know, you're violating union regulations and all this.

And you have no right to do this. And I'm like, I knew this was going to happen.

And I said, Howard, what about the deal you made? What deal?

I don't know anything you're talking about. If you don't leave the set right now,

I'm going to have the police come down here and arrest you.

So I said, God, what the hell?

So I leave the trailer. Rottie's looking at me.

The actor's like me like, what did I do?

I go and get on a phone booth. There's no cell phones.

I said, I call Richard. I said, Richard, I told him what happened.

And he's like, yeah, well, you know, I said, well, this is all screwed up deal.

You guys all knew about it. And evidently, somebody rat-fanked or complained

that I was pushed ahead of everyone else. What am I supposed to do?

He says, well, it's kind of like getting caught out in the rain without an umbrella.

You got wet.

I get this phone call from the studio.

Okay, well, we still need those prosthetics. How are you doing on them?

And it's like nothing had ever happened.

I mean, ultimately, they knew that they screwed up.

So they're not going to admit that to anyone.

But they knew that I hadn't done anything wrong.

And that I was innocent and the whole thing.

And they kept me working.

The one shot that was a really tricky one was

the scene where he comes into the bedroom.

And he walks past the mirror.

And you don't see his reflection.

And that was basically shot in a blue screen shot of the mirror.

So he walks in front of the blue screen.

We then shot a plate of the mirror with nobody in the scene

so that we got the background without his reflection.

As usual, when someone comes in contact with a vampire,

things can get a little ugly.

And we wouldn't want to wake your mother. Would we, Charlie?

Then I have to kill her, too.

He picks me up by the neck and breaks the wall with the back of my head.

I'm coming toward Charlie.

And I'm walking toward him.

And Tom came over and said,

you have to walk like you're the baddest ass in the world.

You have to walk to him with a sense that you are the most powerful creature alive.

There's a moment where Jerry offers Charlie a way out.

He's holding Charlie up and he's saying, come on, you can do this.

You give you something I don't have.

A choice.

All you have to do is just forget about all this and we'll be fine.

And you say, Charlie.

And Charlie refuses.

And Jerry does something very interesting where there's a sense of

why does this always have to happen?

Where he says to Charlie,

fool, you're a fool.

I gave you a way out and you didn't take it.

And now it's war.

Now you are in big fucking trouble.

You're sticking in the hand with a pencil and then you get very upset.

That kind of originated from a film that I saw called X-Caliber.

There was an incredible scene where Lancelot has been stabbed through his guts.

And he's nude.

And you see the blade of this lens going into his flesh.

And you see it actually coming out too.

So it's gone all the way through him.

In a one shot, he pulls it out.

And you see these two little wounds there.

I got the VHS tape and just studied and studied and studied

this because I couldn't believe what my eyes were seeing.

And I'm supposed to be someone of an expert on these things.

So why couldn't I figure it out?

And finally, a dawn dummy that had to be a retractable blade.

So one section is sliding into the next.

And it sprung.

The actor is just pushing it in.

There's no appliance.

He's pushing it and makes a dent on his belly.

When he lets go of it, it springs back to his normal length, right?

One piece slides out of the other.

But to prove that there's a piece over here,

there's just a little tiny tip of a sword.

Stuck onto him, probably, with some kind of adhesive.

And a monofilament fishing line tied to it.

Had to be.

So we see him with his blade sticking through.

And for just a second, hides that tip from the camera.

And that's when somebody yanks it off.

And it's really for years of wanting to use that effect in a film.

I thought, what a perfect opportunity.

We'll do the same thing.

We'll make a retractable pencil.

Prove that the tip is coming through.

Roll it back.

Right as he does this.

Yank this on.

Bam, it's done.

Beautiful.

One on sat.

It's my turn.

Everything worked great.

Beautiful effect.

I finally had Max Calibra moment.

And then I was in the editing room at Boss Film with Tom.

Here comes the scene.

Chris proves that it's sticking all the way through.

Tom cuts to a reaction shot of Billy.

And then back to this.

So completely destroyed the effect.

You know, that it could happen all on one take.

Because obviously it could have been done as a

cheat the way Tom and Ed are with the cutaway.

The point was you don't need a cutaway to show it come all the way out.

Bam.

So I told Tom the he'd ruin the shot.

And then he actually fixed it.

When Jerry's full vampire nest was upon him, it was disfiguring.

You know, and it was disturbing.

It was gross.

It wasn't like Bella Legosi.

You know, it wasn't a guy who's just pasty with a little trickle of blood.

I mean, the guy was a heinous freak.

Working with Chris Arandon, we did three stages of the vampire transformation.

The early stages were a brow piece.

I tried to create a three dimensional paint job that would

kind of blend into the later stages of the transformation.

The second stage was more involved with a piece that came down

like this with a little lines that kind of went down into the face.

So I kind of drew that with the paint job in the earlier versions to tie that in.

Randy Cook's a hell of a sculptor.

He's a really good artist.

One of the best I think I've ever worked with.

Whenever you would sit around with him, he would come up and have an idea.

And ideas would just spill out of his pencil.

He could sit there in five minutes.

And what he could put on your desktop, he could

do caricatures and just descriptive drawings.

He was just a master of the pencil.

I wound up with the main final look of Jerry and the fingers, you know,

and I think Steve did the teeth on that.

I was one of the back room boys, one of the lab boys.

We got a bust of Chris.

We always give the actor who is just getting

a face cast, a pad of paper and a pencil,

so that they can communicate with us.

And they just simply scribble a note, you know.

Hurry or I'm uncomfortable or I'm fine or whatever.

And all of a sudden I get a little note that's getting hot in here.

Shooting day was extremely long for us for the makeup department.

There's many times where we would only have four hours in between shifts.

We'd wrap like one o'clock in the morning and

had to be back like five o'clock in the morning.

Five thirty in the morning until approximately

one thirty to two thirty in the afternoon,

you're in the chair.

Never been through anything like it in my life.

The tedium is, as you can imagine, sitting in the chair for eight hours.

You know, you get up and sort of move around a little bit.

But until the adhesives are all fixed, you can't really do a hell of a lot.

After the first day or two, because this makeup was an eight hour makeup,

I said, you know, you've got to give me something to do.

Or otherwise I'm going to go crazy.

He actually started helping us by putting the finger extensions on his hands,

or at least the one that he could start gluing

down while Canon I was working on his face.

I would help do some of the latex blending.

And then they let me stipple the hands and make up the hands so that, you know,

I could pass a couple hours of the eight.

While he was sitting there for initially eight hours,

we trimmed it down like six and a half hours.

I don't remember ever falling asleep in the makeup chair.

But I remember kind of, you know, from 4 a.m. to noon, we make up.

And then I'd go out and we'd work for eight hours.

Then I'd come back in and get the makeup off in half an hour, 45 minutes.

Go home, sleep for six hours, come back the next

morning and do the same thing for two weeks.

It was a motherfucker.

Our makeup trailer had a little cubby hole up on top with a little black curtain.

And many of nights I slept in that cubby hole.

I slept with a wolf with a stake through it.

Up in there.

And I'd come in the 4 a.m.

And I'd say, hey, good morning and chemical.

Hey, all right, let's go.

Come on, let's do some makeup.

My wife seldom saw me during the week, only on the weekends.

There were plenty of sleepless nights, long day shooting

with not a whole lot of turnaround for the makeup crew.

You know, some of it's a blur because of that.

We had to youth in, Roddy.

What I did there was to use cosmetic lifts, applying tape in six areas of his face.

And then stretch it back and tie it under his hair.

He was in that stretch makeup for like over eight hours.

His makeup look kind of got established during the Peter Vincent,

right night, bumpers that were shot at first.

And part of that look was this kind of theatrical

hair that he had to make him look older.

The silver hair, which was done more like with

an old-style streaks and tips, we call it.

It's almost like a spray paint for the hair that's very theatrical.

And it worked for the Peter Vincent stuff, but as

we were filming him and other scenes, we realized,

well, why would somebody like that actually do that to their hair in real life?

And Randy Cook, I remember, it really bugged him.

And he pleaded with the director.

Can we add a scene where we show Peter Vincent

answering the door when the kids are at the door.

And he's got a bald head.

And then he puts on like a cheap wig to open the door, like his vanity wig.

And that would kind of sell why the hair looks kind of funky like that.

But they didn't go for it.

And we didn't do that.

And it ended up looking like flocking for a Christmas tree.

It's the one part that we weren't happy with for the whole film.

What are we going to do?

What are you going to do?

One of my favorite makeups is the vampire transformations for Steven Jeffries.

Not me.

It was very much an impressionistic paint job, a lot of vain work.

Yeah!

It turned out to be kind of a real life conflict of interest between me and Roddy.

Tom had instructed me to really go after him when I first

tried to attack him before he burns the cross on my forehead.

And the first time I did that, you know, Roddy just

got all flustered and went right to Tom and said,

oh my god, he's too rough with me or something like that.

And, you know, I was like, you got to be kidding.

And Tom just said, you know, do it again.

And then at some point he gets burned with a cross.

That particular effect was evil.

Ed was quite easy because basically I had a fairly thick prosthetic

on the forehead, giving him sort of more of a brow effect.

The kind of thing.

Smoke tubes on the back of the cross, nothing on Steven's

forehead, bam, smokes pumped out, probably just cigarette smoke.

And then we had replaced his forehead with a prosthetic forehead that

had a very deep cross-shaped wound that was made exactly the same.

So we just sat the cross into that indentation, some

slimy stuff, a little more smoke, and pulled it away.

What if you got to me back out?

Later he appears in a raggedy end wig.

And that's like my favorite look for him.

I know.

I can really see a lot of depth and translucency in that paint job.

You'd had all these films at Howling and We're with London.

Everybody's work was getting better at doing

human to monster transformations and back.

And I wanted to push the envelope.

I worked on the Howling with Robo Team, went

straight onto American We're with Rick Baker.

And while these were very jaw-dropping, groundbreaking effect sequences,

it just always kind of bugged me that they're transforming symmetrically.

And I know it was probably being a little too hard on this

is the first time anybody had ever done anything like that.

I'm going, I could do that better.

The idea was that when he gets knocked off of the ballast red, the falls

and under floor, he hits the light and the light swings back and forth.

And that was the idea to use the light swinging in the shadow to cause the

transformation from one side of him to the other when he turns in camera.

So I always thought, wouldn't it be cool? I mean, who's to say if you're transforming

from a wolf into a boy or vice versa, that it would happen in a very even way?

I thought it would be much more interesting if we could get a

little quasi-mode I wanted, but you know, deformities happening.

I really don't know how I endured that.

It literally took 18 hours before we could walk him on the set and shoot that

scene. It was insane. I've never been

involved in a makeup that's taken that long.

I think they gave me some kind of pill to sleep in

the chair. I mean, I was just sitting there basically

with shorts on, you know, with all these guys

painting my arms and legs and sticking on wolf hair.

Stephen's head is inside the neck of the beast.

So he looks down like this, looks through

holes in the neck that had hair over it, but the head of the creature is out here.

So we get this elongated, more dog-like neck. And of

course that's all cable operation. And on the front.

There was, you know, at least three people working on him at all

times. And everything had to be just right for the whole thing to work.

The hand was another trick altogether. That was so beyond its time and so difficult.

What we did is I made a dog paw, a skeleton dog paw, and then literally built

up separate human hand muscles, veins, and tendons of a human-shaped hand.

And then I put a very thin scandal to that of gelatin

again that made it look exactly like a human hand.

Then each of these tendons were attached to cables that we

could pull underneath the floor, underneath the dog's paw.

And they were also made of multiple gelatin. So off-frame, we put

these space heaters, ramp the speed up, and melted the hell out of it.

Now why were we melting it? When we got soupy to skin, the outer skin,

we'd start pulling the muscles and veins away to reveal hoof paw.

Then we reversed that. So what you see is the wolf paw growing human

muscles and veins and tendons and then a skin forming around that.

It was pretty out there, it was pretty crazy.

Originally for Ghostbusters, Steve had me sculpt the

librarian arms about a year before. They just were never used.

They were very elongated and we wanted something very thin and spindly, knuckily.

So you put a little bit of realism together and stretch that

reality in order to get something that's new and kind of creepy.

He's got one false skinny arm that's being robbed of to a false wall.

One leg is going through the false floor, one of his legs, the actors,

and there's a big fake one that's being runpuppeted through the floor.

It was really impressive on set. It was just a really good sequence

and I didn't realize how good it would be until I saw the movie.

If you look carefully, you can see his arms stuck behind him. So

you'll see his elbow and then you see the fake arms that I had made.

At one point, Steve's saying, you know, I have a wet his eye up a little bit

here. Give me the methacill, which is used as a thickener in food products.

It doughnuts and like jelly and that sort of thing. And so he's giving

me the methacill, and grabs it, opens it up and pours it in the eye.

You start to pour it in his mouth for good measure. And pour Steven's.

He's like, what is this stuff? He's like, don't worry about it. He doesn't don't it.

And he's just doesn't taste like he's done as I ever ate.

And I look at the eye that he ported in, not Steven's real

eye, but the glass science getting all cloudy. Oh hell.

It's not methacill, it's glue.

It was just the most inhumane experience.

It was always nice for me to come in, you know, five

minutes before shooting star. It's a cup of coffee.

Hey, how's it going? Let's get to work.

I remember getting out of this, you know, for the

last time. And I ran as fast as I could away from it.

And it just brings with it a lot of mixed feelings

at this present time to be sitting next to it.

And action.

What makes that scene work is Steven.

Is cry of pain and of loss and of realizing what he's given up and what he's become.

I think I cried the first time I saw it. It was like, wow, the way it was edited, the

makeup, it just really came to this point where you just felt so sad for this guy.

That was also a really heartfelt scene by Roddy. I

mean, his performance in that scene was pretty great.

I mean, my heart breaks every time I watch it. Steven makes it kill.

Randy had set up a grid in front of the camera and trace with

grease pencil for registration for Steven Jeffery's head.

And I would go in and I would progressively add more

and more makeup on him in like five or six stages.

And we did a dissolve, we shot it in, it was shot in reverse. And I was

very impressed with that, just like how we pulled that off. Low tech.

Billi attacks Peter. Stop or I'll shoot.

And in his demise, the deterioration of the body went from a series of phases.

The producers were kind of pushing us to work faster. And we

were up on the stairs with the camera shooting down at him.

And he's going to take a bullet to the

forehead and one of us would get right behind

camera and look at what was being filmed from the point of view of the camera.

And so if we could see anything weird shadow or something that was out of

place, we could tell the other guy that was down there, you know, what to fix.

And I was up there painting little dots and painting with the

shadow and color to try to get rid of this edge or whatever it was.

And I just remember one of the producers yelling down, hey

Rick, stop trying to pick the fly shit out of the pepper.

In other words, it was something he couldn't really see was

wrong and everybody's waiting on me. Come on, we got a roll.

But there was something that definitely needed to be fixed.

One of the things I like about that sequence

is there's a certain humor about it.

You know, you catch Billi sitting up at the bottom of the stairs.

It was great. That's one of the things I like about the script is that opportunity

for humor, which is that they're great contrast for this, you know, they horror.

If you look at the one I'm going up the stairs, there's one contact I'm

looking this way, but the other one straight ahead in my actual eye.

I actually had two contacts and I couldn't

see. So every time I go up the stairs, I trip.

And after like three times, Tom just take one out so you can

see Bill writes, he'll take that stake and shows it at me.

Then of course they cut and they put this thing

around me with the stakes sticking out of me.

And I'm ready to shoot and they go, oh, lunch.

I'm like, okay, so we're going to take this off,

right? When we put it on, it's a long process. So no.

So I go into the commentary. I got the stakes

sticking out this far. And I've got to eat now.

Try eating when you've got a stake sticking out

of you that goes out to here. Very difficult.

That's a whole series of different effects melded together. There's a

shot of Billi and then there's a separate shot or a puppet hand comes up.

Melting.

With the hands, I wanted to do something really interesting

and I didn't want it to be that typical 80s thing where I mean,

every move you see when somebody starts transforming or

deteriorating, they always look at their hand first and it transforms.

What's next? So I thought, okay, well, we don't want to do just

that. And we've got boss films optical facility here to help.

In order to make our shots intercut with regularly shot

anamorphic footage, we would shoot our plates in 65

millimeter, which is a wide screen format, more than

three times the size of a normal 35 millimeter film.

So basically what we do is we shoot it on 65

and then we make a composite in 35 anamorphic.

And the quality of our shots often exceeds the quality of the original photography.

And so what we designed together with Richard was to have both

hands come up in the same shot. But the first one, again, I came

with this really off of a little concept. I was looking at my hands

and thinking, wow, left and right hands are very, very similar.

What if I took a life casting of Jonathan's

palm and sculpted the back of the hand on it?

Start it up by doing life casts off of very small women off of

their hands. They were women about five foot, but Jonathan starts

probably six, three, six, four. So he's very tall. So with their

smaller hands, I actually built everything on top of a woman's hand.

Foam and rubber on top of that were tubes, which pumped ooze

on top of that then was a foam latex. So this girl gets out of

frame raises her hand up like this. We're editing here so you

don't frame in here so you don't see it. And all she had to do was

and it looks like the hand is bending backwards and

with some sound effects, it was pretty effective.

Richard Edelman's genius was optical printing. He did

what they now do with CGI, but he did it in camera.

So we shot all three separate elements, composite

them into one shot so we could kick Rick Baker

and Robo Teen's ass and say, hey, look, look how

cool this is. We got three effects in one sucker.

His character was kind of weird. I mean, it's kind

of like, what is he? And John would say that's

like, who am I? When I went as what is Billy Cole

in my like a zombie era? And it was kind of vague.

Here's my answer. I don't know. I don't know.

No, I didn't have an idea. I mean, it never came up and I

never thought about it. Everybody wants to know I want to know.

Go to Tom Holland's house, knock on his door

and ask him what I was because I have no idea.

I figured, well, he's eager. He's the helper. He's bitten, but

he hasn't turned yet, which is why he can go out in the day.

He's what a vampire needs as a helper to accomplish his task

where he has to go out into sunlight. So that's who Billy is.

We made a fairly standard, you know, Raiders of Lost Ark shoulders up puppet that was just, I

mean, I think it probably took 30 people to operate this thing. Now, it was made of gelatin, layers

of colored gelatin so that when we hit it with space heaters from outside of frame, it would melt.

Of course, we had to shoot it a lower frame rate because it took too long to actually melt it.

I remember when they were testing the Billy

disintegration, it had like a dozen hoses in different

parts of them so it would swell up. And you've got

all these people on not highly trained techniques.

You just kids, you know, kids like the rest of us. And

they're pushing these things and hoping it'll work.

And one of them pushed too hard and this hose became

disentangled from Billy's rubber face and whipped off.

And this big spurred of benzene went across, you know, 30 feet

across the studio and hit me right in the eye, right in the eye.

And so I had to go to the hospital. I thought, I'm dying. I'm

going to go blind from fright night, you know, but the doctor.

And I think a fifth of Lafroy Scott reassured me

that it was that always going to be well eventually.

One thing that I created was I took just a standard skull and I added, you know, just little

subtleties in the sculpture so that there was points, you know, of course, the vampire fangs. And I

thought, well, you know, he's a henchman. Steve had already decided to use the longer skull for

Jerry. I thought, well, let's just go something a little similar. They don't have to be the same race.

The skull at the end, that ended up with John and Stark and

he's been promising to give it to me for years, says it's in

his garage, he just hasn't gotten around looking for it, but

he hasn't gotten around looking for it for about 20 years now.

But that would complete my fright night collection, that skull.

After the thing was wrapped, I had to go down to a warehouse

in Santa Monica. And they basically just had me stand up and

put tubes through my head of green stuff and blood, which

was basically kind of like carosurup, which is really sticky.

And after about four hours of that, I was covered in blood and this green muck and

everything I was, it was sticky and every time I pulled my shirt out, it would hurt.

So they said, well, you're wrapped. And I said, oh, great, great. So just

point me to the shower. Let me get this thing off and I'll head home.

You know, our plumbing's down. So I, what got a drive home like this?

Yeah. Okay. So I'm a little car driving on Santa Monica freeway.

I'm covered in blood and green stuff and the clothes are a mess,

you know. And I look at my gas gauge and I have to get gas. Fuck.

So I go on a gas station and I'm not going to pump my own, right? So I

wait for the guy to come out and he, I'm trying to keep my head above.

Yeah, just give me a couple bucks for

regular and the guy looks down like this ago.

Okay. Okay. Okay. And he does it and then I just

like, yeah, thanks. Thanks to take off. And then as

I'm leaving, I see him on the phone like this and

thinking, oh my guy's probably calling the cops.

You know, that's the stuff that always happens

when you really don't want it to happen.

One of the thoughts that I had was that there was

somehow a prior connection between Jerry and Amy.

Part of Jerry Danjage's connection to Amy's character

is that I reminded him of someone that he loved.

Looks just like it doesn't she? She looked to me like someone that

I was deeply in love with and that I was determined to return to.

I couldn't because this woman was obviously gone, but here she is again. Chomped. And

for Amy, it's knowing that there's something

there. What's the attraction in this guy?

God, it's neat. And that decision colored that

relationship from the very beginning of the relationship

straight through to the denumine, you know, the final

sort of turning her into that horrible creature.

That is so iconic. No crushes after that. I saw the real, the real Amy.

Vampires have always been a metaphor for seduction

and they are sensual in and of themselves.

They do things that we all want to do, play all night,

sleep all day. And in this story, there is a sensuality, a

subtext, an undercurrent that runs underneath it because

the young boy finds that the vampires after his girlfriend.

I had a great team in terms of wardrobe and hair and makeup.

She starts off as the plane jane and she gets entranced by Jerry Dandrich.

And it's a seductive dance and her makeup and hair starts to get more extreme.

She transforms, and this was something that

Tom very specifically wrote into the script and

filmed that way in which she met a more foses

from a girl into a woman by dancing with him.

And it's very subtle, but I don't know if you've noticed it, fans, but

in the makeup, literally Amy in one of the turns turns into a woman.

We're all made up of good and bad and giving Chris a rend and something to play,

deep in that character and has made Jerry Dandrich resound in the audience's mind,

and it has also led to a lot of women being madly in love with Chris Sarandon.

One of the things that I hear from a lot of females who watch the

film, their big fans of the film, is the way Chris Sarandon looks.

They just think he's so hot in this film. And I'm hearing them talk and

I said, well, you know, I thought I had a lot to contribute to that.

My early conversations with Tom Holland, he told me he wanted Chris

to look super sexy. And what I did was utilize basic beauty makeup

techniques by shaping the face with highlights and shadow, blush,

eyeliner, but really well blended to not look like a beauty makeup.

Chris is a good looking man, but we took it to the extreme with him.

When she began transforming into a vampire, Tom wanted to be

more sexy. Makes a lot of sense, vampires are sexy, right?

And so the straight makeup department did her makeup even better and she did

look sexy. She put the lenses. That's always sexy. It works for the golf kids.

Amy's transformation not only was it wardrobe getting tighter

and then they built the white dress, which was so beautiful.

And Amy's boobs got bigger. Her eyes changed color and all

of a sudden her hair went from brown to this kind of red.

When you turn into a vampire, your hair grows. It's

very simple. It changes to Hannah if you're a woman.

Her hair got longer for the same reasons her breasts

got bigger. I actually made prosthetic breasts for her.

Full-mover appliance. It was just my dream breast at the time. So

that was kind of cool. It's kind of a subtle thing, but it was fun.

So on the day she shows up and she's already. She

said, I've got a swimsuit on underneath my clothes.

So when you guys are ready, what I will do is I will just simply drop my top. You can

do the impression. She gets the sardonic grin, but she also gets a very nice chest.

Thanks to the Special Effects Department. I mean,

Fright night. What a great film. And we got girls.

And I kept those breasts in a box on my closet shelf for 25 years.

I finally let them go at one of these conventions that we do.

I was like, why am I keeping these rubber breasts?

I should have kept my things. I loved my things.

I had three different pairs. I had little baby

ones. Those are the ones I'd really like to have.

And then the mediums and then the big ones as Amy, the monster grew.

She was kind of like this nightmarish Marilyn Monroe thing,

you know, that whole dress and the hair and the voice.

Don't you want me anymore?

What is vampy? What was going to get Charlie the sort of finishing touches the

icing on the cake, if you will, with this character before it turns to that?

Maybe Tom has a thing for Redheads. I don't know.

Late into the game, Tom Holland, who's a great guy. I like him

a lot. But he came over and was being extra special friendly.

Wow, I really need something special and Richard won't go for it.

You think just as a favor to me, you can sculpt a shark mouth.

I was blocking that scene in the basement and Amy said, oh Charlie, you

promised you'd protect me. Why did you do that? And she turned away.

You promised you wouldn't let him get me. You promised.

Then she turned back in the playing of the scene, but it didn't

play like being a terrible moment because I hadn't written it.

And I realized that if she turned around and if she

had the mouth from hell, that it was a huge scream.

We can't pay for it. Could you do it for free? Yeah, I

guess. Don't tell anybody, you know, it shoots Tuesday.

Yeah, but you know, that's real quick. I can't do it that quick.

It's only going to be on screen for a second. Just for a second.

I don't care how bad it is, how rickety or whatever. It's

a quick shot. You know, should be running right at camera.

No matter how bad it is, nobody of care. As long as there's a shock on the reveal.

But it was crude as hell, rough as guts, right? But I

knew it was only going to be on screen for a second.

I think that Tom didn't want me to see he wanted

it to be a reveal, you know, a real surprise.

You know, for those who went into oral sex, that's your nightmare come alive.

So it put that on, blended it in, and put a very extreme

deep set eyes. Something I felt it would be jump out.

Tom loved it so much. He ended up shooting with it all day.

And like, there's so much coverage. And I was just in sense.

This is never going to work. We're going to look like assholes

with this, you know, immobile mask glued on his actress face.

And look what happened. I'm showing you how much I know.

When the movie was about to be released, have you seen the

poster? No, I haven't seen the poster. What's on the poster?

Because I thought, you know, Jerry Danage makeup pretty good. You know,

that might be it. He's lead vampire. That ought to be pretty good.

And I said, no, it's a man to be rich as a shark

mouth. I said, oh fuck you. I'm doing anything.

I put that on a poster and I showed the poster. I just about plodged.

You know, they painted it better than we made it, you know, fortunately,

because it wasn't a photograph. But boy, you know, you never trusted director.

We did it on the spur of the moment and we improvised and it worked. See that, that's

why, that's why God has to bless you and you have to catch lightning in a bottle.

You know, and that this whole movie was like

that. It wound up working. But you don't

want to freeze frame that. Don't want to freeze frame that on Blu-ray, okay folks?

Just sort of just let the movie play as it was meant to be seen.

We've been filming. It was very hot. It was claustrophobic. And there were

all these low beams and she kept hitting her head on the beams, you know,

doing what she was supposed to be doing and the camera is really

tight. And after a bunch of takes of this, I realized she was crying.

She had hit her head really bad. But, you know,

everybody around her on the set were like, haha,

and this cool, you know, look, she, because she

looked like she was laughing the whole time.

But I knew inside that she was really crying.

And at one point I said, oh, listen, I had enough

of this. And I reached in and I pulled the teeth

out of her mouth, ripping the lips on the makeup.

I think, okay, I think we're done here because I just was pissed off.

That didn't feel very good, but again, show must go on.

And then someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, hey

Rick, you know, we're not done shooting this sequence yet.

What can you do to fix him? It's like, oh Jesus, I realized I made a bonehead move.

Contact lenses were not that old at that time.

Now we have full scleral lenses that are soft and they

go in the eye and they could be worn for several hours.

Back then you were limited to 20 minutes, half an hour at

the most before they just got unbearable for the actor.

The dreaded legendary contact lenses, those were all my fault.

The only way to let you know what it feels like is if somebody throws

a handful of sand in your eye for an hour, that's what it feels like.

Because they're just uncomfortable.

So they were painted. Now these are not soft contact lenses, these

are glass pieces of semi-circular glass that you stuck in your eye.

I did the artwork with fluorescent paints and

then laminated in layers, your desert paints.

And actual flakes of glitter. Now that sounds awful and dangerous.

It probably would be if not for the fact that

they were layered in another coat of a croat.

I'm in this pair of lenses and they go in my eyes

and I'm just saying they're going, oh this is bad.

And I'm not one to squeak the wheel but this really doesn't feel right.

So I finally had to. I just said something's

going on and they took the lenses

out and realized that they hadn't sanded the paint on the back of the glass lens.

So it was kind of scratch in my eyes a little bit

and I like to give Steve a hard time about that.

The legend has it that everybody hated them and it was a

disaster and I almost blinded them but it might have been.

Even if there was no paint on these things at all they would

have hurt. These were hard shells put on top of people's eyes.

Looking back I'm amazed that they were able to get away with that.

They were really really big and thick and I swear to

God it was the most painful uncomfortable experience.

They somehow dealt with it.

It's not fun but nobody said this was going to be fun but they pays a lot of money.

Tom wanted to accomplish the vampire's point of

view. We see what is Jerry's point of view is a bat.

The opportunity is one of the metaphors for Jerry as well which was wind

where a lot of the times wind came along with light to symbolize his presence.

It's a man at Charlie scared.

Richard Edeland coming up with the off the balcony into a shadow

of the bat. That's Richard figuring out how to do it in camera.

Brewster is confronted by the vampire and then you cut back to Brewster and

the vampire the shadow of the vampire becomes you know and then flies away.

That was the way to do it and my theory on how to do transformations is

always do it within action and do it in an unexpected way for the audience.

You're out of time.

And also do it inexpensively so it was actually quite cheap to do that

because it was basically a black man animated and it was very effective.

Rendy Cook's bat. Now that was amazing. That was a huge overhead

rig. It was like you know the old bats they used to put on strings.

It was like ten leagues beyond that. It had pole cables for different parts

of the skeleton and it also had tension going down so when you pulled up

you had tension which would make it look like you're really muscling it because

it were pulling down at the same time a little bit less than pulling up.

I love the bad effects but I think my effects suck.

So one of the tricks we used for the veins because we knew

we had to do several sets of wings they had to match is I did

a pinnacle on the paper and then we sent that out to have a

brass etched and created a one of a kind of a kind of thing.

Mark would spray coats of vein colored rubber on top of the

rubber and then it was encased in more rubber could have

just painted it you know as it turned out for all you saw

it because it's all the wings are all wrinkling like hell.

We're doing the bat on the set and working very late because we've made a

very fine structure and I was puppeteering it fiberglass mostly over my hand.

And Roddy you know grabs a bone puts in the bath's mouth to keep the bat

from biting it and the goddamn head broke him like that and just like that.

I was thrilled because now I can say I was the guy that got

to scratch Roddy went down on the cheek for fright night.

I mean who else gets to do that I mean there he was laying on

the ground you know back claw up there director yells action

and then you pull the hand away to reveal that you know cut on

his cheek and then you're you're in film history right there.

Right there fright night on set movie moments which people remember.

You were smoking a and B smoke right and I'm

up there lying in Roddy with dowels laugh.

The A and B smoke on it splashing around and it gets on my

neck and the acid part acid and base that's why it's A and P.

I believe God on my neck you can see that you can still see the scar.

We were dealing with stupid chemicals in a rather stupid way but most of us lived.

You had to have certain shots in order to make it a

vampire movie and we got those shots and then some.

We had a burn that was created I think we pretty much built it up on the day.

That was done with the liquid vinyl application

on top of the foam latex prosthetic.

The final makeup scene the very final scene in which

Jerry is the kind of Nosferatu character comes.

You know ears and facial pieces of hair skull cap hands had to be

completely redone everything literally a complete transformation.

Trying to find the type of device to give us the really

parallel rays of sunlight to get the hair out of the body.

The whole rays of sunlight to get the lights coming through the windows.

We ended up using sky trackers which were zined on but

they were just made for search lights at that time.

The heavens life ended and ended by a teenage boy first of all massively ironic

and what must be running through this creature's mind when that's going on.

I've made it this far how do I hang on and yet I don't.

And you know what that's fun.

They break open the windows and the light hits them

on the chest and the body goes flying through the air.

Well that was a stunt man that was done in a set that was turned on it's side.

So they dropped him on his back through frame into a block of styrofoam.

They strapped him into this whole rig on wheels that they could

pull him against this wall like these of all a fire exploding.

I'd seen so many vampire deteriorations in my time from the

heart of Dracula or Christopher Lee turns into cardboard.

I mean you name it. But it's always an effect.

It's not a real vampire really deteriorating and I

thought damn it there's got to be a way to some chemical

or some process on this earth that can actually

make an animatronic puppet and actually destroy it.

Just really have it melt not a fake effect but really do it.

I decided why sculpt a new puppet when I've got one left

over from Ghostbusters that was never used in the film.

If you remember the librarian

transformation of the beginning of the film.

We used the skull from Ghostbusters they were left over us but they were so cool

and we were pressed for time so off the shelves and they became part of the film.

You had to do different hopefully imaginative

bits of sleight of hand that hadn't been done

to death so people would feel like they were

seeing something they'd never seen before.

We put rods like through the elbows and poke holes through the walls.

Put a rod from the back of the head which went through the wall and

then also through the feet so that the feet could be raised and lowered.

So you have him raising and lowering and then kicking along with

the flame effects going so you have him just burning in frame.

It looked like something at the carnival you know.

Those were literally the last days of filming so we blew up and burned

up as much stuff as we could until we had nothing to burn anymore.

And we were done.

I told you there was a lot of cocaine but it

led me to come up with liquid nitroglycerin.

That could be pumped through brass tubing into foam rubber.

Now the way that works is you pump nitric acid in.

The animatronic puppet will get soaked with that and then you

have other brass tubes that you pump a little sulfuric acid in.

Now the menophanacyl furoch acid hits the foam

rubber puppet that's been soaked in nitroglycerin.

It becomes nitroglycerin, liquid nitroglycerin

and blackens and charrs and literally goes away.

Making a face out of flash paper, what the hell, that's crazy.

Which is something that burns like that.

Sometimes it's the crazy ideas that leads you into the most

interesting solutions and that was sure and interesting.

A lot of the stuff we were burning is toxic so we

couldn't burn it in a closed building or on a closed set.

It was a pretty light and kind of a party atmosphere that day.

There's a chemical that you can neutralize, acid with.

So I'm just neutralizing the puppet, neutralizing

it, neutralizing so we can throw it away safely.

Not thinking of thing until I'm driving home

on the 405 and my feet started to tingle.

I don't know, I guess it's really odd. I wonder why my

feet are maybe they're asleep and I've got home literally.

Ran in the house, looked out at my tennis shoes

and they were literally burned off my feet.

From not the acid but the neutralizing.

But it's just as strong but on the other end of the

spectrum, the excitement of having the effect of work.

I just paid no attention to the fact that my feet were literally melting off.

I couldn't walk for a few weeks but they're all better now.

The music of Fright Night is as much loved by the fans as the movie itself.

Starting his career in the 1970s, composer Brad Fieldals,

unique yet campaign score for Fright Night would capture

the imagination of horror fans for years to come.

Not that. I am an of classical tastes, found it so appealing.

I was walking across the studio a lot with my agent at the

time and Gary Lemel, who was the head of music at the studio,

came by and said, wow, what a job you did on Terminator, really cool, great job.

There's something coming up that I think I'm going to want to talk to you about.

I thought he did such a brilliant job with the Terminator. That's why I hired Brad.

You could see electronic music coming on and I

had heard it previously with Tangerine Dream.

I felt very lucky because often in film you meet with a director

and he tells you all the stuff about what's in his film,

where it comes from what this point of view is and he quotes other films.

This is real window, this is this, and really the subtext

is about the older man stealing the young man's woman.

He had all of this inside of him because he invented all of this.

When every movie you do, you always have your temporary music and then you have to,

as it comes a point, we have to let it go and listen

to what your composer is doing and embrace that.

Sometimes that's quite challenging, especially if they don't really hit it.

Tom and I collaborated very closely on everything in the movie, so

we went up to Brad's house to hear Brad's initial takes on the music.

He played us these things and it was like, wow, this is great.

The score for Fright Night is mostly synthesizer

plus acoustic piano plus electric violin.

I thought the violin, first of all, Transylvania, the whole thing of

violin, but it's really the sustains that I loved and that kind of scary,

that baddy, vampire-y kind of thing that we could do.

A lot of people didn't realize it was electric violin and over

the years through social media, I've gotten these questions.

And there are people who sent things and look,

I got that solo, but there's this one part.

You know, and I'm like, that's because it's violin, dude.

I do remember a couple of times where we disagreed about some things and

then his fire would come up in my memory and I'm pretty passionate too.

So we had a couple of things where I'm like, but I really think this

scene, you know, to check this out, listen to this and he listened

to my thing and he was like, I don't know because I think it's

going too much this way and I'm like, yeah, but really listen again.

And then we'd get through it or I'd make a

certain change and he'd be like, yeah, that's it.

And he'd go, I remember him once going, I thought we were

going to have a tough time there for a minute, you know.

Some of those opening moments when Charlie sees the

vampire next door, that could have been just scary.

But knowing what Tom was going for, I kept it

just kind of curious and a little bit lighter.

So it's really important to understand what a director

is going for and then kind of put that behind and then

just become an audience of the film and see, how is the

music going to make this the most enjoyable ride possible.

Gary Lemell gave me David Shackler who had this brilliant idea of

creating the music to reflect whatever was going on in each scene.

We didn't buy existing songs, we created songs for

the movie and for the album which wasn't done then.

That point soundtracks were becoming very, very

important for these features. They appealed to the

younger demographic radio played them and it

became a whole other marketing piece for the film.

And Tom had wanted a piece of electronic

sport that would appeal to the younger demo.

In his script he left reading spots for the music to come in, he

knew exactly what he wanted. So we went through the script, Q by Q.

Then I got together with some of the writers

that we worked with, some of the artists

and we created a song for each Q. I would do a demo of the songs, can you pick them?

The challenge for composers when the songs from

the film made millions of dollars for the studios.

So then all of a sudden there was this pressure to use

songs in the films to have a profitable sound track.

The Jay Giles band who we used for the title track, they were always fun.

The group that did the title song, I know that they did

a music video because I went out to watch them shoot it.

We were originally giving some footage of the film to take a look at and it

struck us that it was sort of like a documentary of our harmonica player's life.

Because he's been living next door to a vampire for

some 15 or 16 years and no one believes him here.

We had a group in there called the Fabulous Fontaine which

was not really a group, it was two of my songwriters.

We just needed this little cube to fit in this radio

sequence and these guys wrote perfect radio records.

The dance sequence was just really critical, it all had to be woven

together and capture the entire scene. It was pretty intricate.

The dance scene was one of my favorite scenes to edit as well. Then I used to

David Bowie cut, it called Criminal World and it played great with that scene.

It played so well that we wanted to use it in the movie but we couldn't afford it.

I don't remember the choreographer's name, it was a woman. I'm

pretty sure that Tom said to her, look this dance has got to be hot.

This has got to be something that both men and women are

going to get turned on by because that's the whole idea here.

We didn't have a music track, we had probably a beat

track, I don't think the music had been created yet.

Part of the vampire attraction to people I think is a sensual one and a

sexual one and the dance itself is kind of the personification of that idea.

It's about chemistry, it's about physical chemistry.

We were just connected with each other and our energy together and so it plays.

It's very interesting to me because I get a lot of women

who come up to me about it and talk about the dance

scene, you know, just say I've watched that scene over

and over again and a lot of men who do the same thing.

When it came time to do the dance scene where he isn't there in his

reflection, he would step in with me, he stayed there on the set.

It's very generous in that way with his time because

a lot of actors if they're not working, they're gone.

And then he would come in and spot so he would step in

and out of it for me and that was enormously helpful.

He picks up one bouncer and throws him across the room.

Which was just a cable pole I think with a stuntman.

The other one where he takes the big guy, we had the bouncer on a dolly.

He's standing on his platform, we just pranked the

hydraulic, and he raises a mother to cheer you up like that.

And it worked really well.

I went to that film mix where we were mixing all the elements

together and I was curious to see what songs they chose.

For the most part there was no conflict. That was a lucky thing about Fright Night.

There wasn't any area where I thought the score had

a really important expression in its own development.

That was being eliminated because they were sticking a song on top.

I thought David Schackler and Tom had a very smart use of the songs.

The songs dramatically reflected what was going on in the scenes.

Your life is the same day after day.

Everything that you do.

You do the same only.

I came up with what it later became called Come To Me.

I wrote it for the scene where Chris is finally seducing Amanda's character

and the bite on the neck and the classic The Blood Dripping Downer shoulder.

And that's what inspired that piece.

I think the agreement was that he could do one song in it.

I wasn't really into writing songs for film. I

actually thought songs were kind of intrusive.

But I wrote that song and I felt, wow, that is perfect.

And I called Tom and he came over and I said, this is something I

can use throughout the film but here is where it really pays off.

It was my vocal at that point.

When I was in the dubbing stage, putting together the scene, the lyrics

fought the dialogue or it pulled away from the emotion of the moment.

And the emotion of the moment of course was that Chris was playing.

That Amy was the reincarnation of his long lost love, which gave it a pathos.

He listened, he said, I can't have the singing.

I felt that the lyrics pulled away from that.

I was like really deflated, you know, because I thought it was really cool.

And I thought about it and I thought, you know, I lost my objectivity

because I wrote the song and I'm singing it and I'm loving it, you know.

And he's really right because at that moment the scene

is so crucial that if you hear some dude singing,

you're like hearing a lyrics and a little

piece of your brain is going off the moment.

I did get a phone call once. This is really funny because on the CD

it's a certain length, not very long because the cue wasn't that long.

And I got a call from this woman, this before

social media, so I have no idea how she found me.

I pick up the phone, there's a woman, hi, you

know, my name's Beth, I'm calling for Michigan.

This Brad Fidel, yeah, this is Brad Fidel.

You know that song for Fright night, you know, the piece where Chris

is biting her neck and stuff, he said, do you have a longer version?

And I'm like, no, that's the version we recorded.

And she goes, well, my boyfriend and I really

like that song, but we could use a longer version.

And I was like, well, just copy it and paste it together.

I couldn't believe that she was actually calling me saying, you

know, it needs to be longer for what we want to do to it, you know.

I think it's a killer album. I still have fans who bring me

the LP design, it's evocative, it's sexy, it's terrifying.

It's all the things the movie is, and more, in that it

enhances all those qualities that the movie has in space.

There was kind of an added bonus job doing the score for Fright night, which was that

there were these old films that were on Peter Vincent's show and on Charlie's TV.

So I had to create this music that was believable. Luckily, it

was only coming out of a TV speaker, so that helped the chief.

Because I couldn't go in with a live orchestra and those old films were always

done with live orchestra. There wasn't the technology to do other things.

So I had to come up both musically and sonically

sound-wise with something that would work.

It was like 12 seconds or something, and it was

coming out of a little speaker, it had to be right.

I kept the vampires wrist-putted to wild. Right, Charlie.

The original ending that I had written was that

Amy and Charlie were in bed, finally having

consummated their relationship, I hope, and they're

watching Peter Vincent on the Friday night frights.

And I had Peter Vincent start to transform into

a vampire, meaning that he had been bitten.

And I went out on Charlie and Amy looking at

Peter and the whole thing was starting again.

You know, it didn't feel right. You know, these were guys who had sailed

through this horrible experience and to have the vampire win at the end.

In those days, you know, it wasn't really what people were looking for.

And Guy McIlley in the head of the studio called me

up almost hysterical, shouting at me in the phone.

You can't do that with this movie. You can't have a down ending.

You have come to like these people so much, and are rooting for them so much,

there's no way you can turn Peter Vincent into a vampire for God's sake.

No. Wow. That seemed sacrilegious.

So that put me with what was I going to do? So I took that

scene and I added it into Peter Vincent giving them a wink.

But that still didn't give me a button for it. So I had Charlie get up and that's

when I had him turn and look out the window and there he sees the glowing eyes.

And that can only be the lead. And then I looked at that when

I cut it all together and it still didn't have a closure.

It still didn't have a button. Charlie, is something wrong?

What am I going to do? You know, and then I started going through the

dialogue looking if there was something I could steal from somewhere.

And I came to that scene and I thought that's the key line.

This is the last time I'm ever ever going to say this again.

You're so cool, Brewster.

Oh, you're so cool, Brewster.

Fright Night would be released in 1545 theaters and became a surprise

hit at the box office making six million dollars in its opening weekend.

I really think I should have been paid more.

Much to the amazement every day and with more

than a little help from the great Peter Vincent,

Fright Night became the best performing horror

film released during the summer of 1985.

What would you do if you accidentally discovered the

house next door was occupied by something not human?

Directors always feel that the studio reveals too much

in the trailer. I mean, that's a constant complaint.

You look at the trailer and everything's in there

and you feel like, well, why bother to see the film?

The problem was they were selling it as hardcore horror.

It's unspeakably evil.

And it wasn't. It had all the scares and the jumps, but it had this

heart and this humor and charm and it was totally lost in the trailer.

The studio cut a very straightforward horror trailer with no comedy and

at whatsoever, which we felt was misrepresenting the nature of the movie.

I guess in marketing one of the biggest fears is a confused audience. So

sometimes to make sure it's clear what something is, they simplify what it is.

You'll do anything to protect yourself, but it will do anything to protect its secret.

And so I was trying to argue with marketing, which

is an exercise in futility with a large studio.

So the best I could think of was that I would have Kent cut

something together and I didn't remember, but I guess I voiced it.

Of course we thought it was a really good trailer and because it really showed you

more about the movie it was, it wasn't as straight horror, it was more than that.

But, you know, the studio publicity department was still

re-humoring us, but they didn't end up going that way.

Fright Night, if you love being scared, this could be the night of your life.

I remembered going to a screening, to a preview, I was so nervous

in such a nervous wreck that I went home and I hyperventilated.

I just was a total nervous wreck and I don't know

whether it was because I felt my career was riding on it.

I don't think it was that. I think that I loved the movie and I

was hoping that the audience would feel the same way about it.

When the film was initially screened at the Motion Picture Academy, I said, oh my

god, I'm going to suck. I'm going to be terrible, I'm going to get out of town.

So I actually laughed, I didn't go because I

was afraid, you know, I fear, what if I was bad?

I would have to walk out through all these

people, everybody going, yeah, it was interesting.

I had no idea that this face, that that was going

to turn into the one sheet, the poster for the film.

And when I saw that, for the first time, on the giant billboard on Sunset.

That was really cool to see.

My name up on the billboard and something I was in on

Sunset Boulevard, that's about as far as you can go with it.

The little light inside Jerry Dandridge's house was a real

light that they would turn on and it just had this awe to it.

When I saw the movie for the first time with an audience, they went fucking crazy.

I mean screaming, yelling, yelling at the screen,

cheering, clapping. This audience went wild.

I remember going to see it on Hollywood Boulevard at just a

theater there with just a regular crowd, not an industry crowd.

And that was a hoot and a half because people get taken on this ride.

They get taken on this journey, this roller coaster ride of the story

that's just at once kind of a funny, goofy, crazy, what happened?

And to know what's coming by that time and then to just really

enjoy the moment while other people experience it was really cool.

You have to have faith for that to work Mr. Vincent.

When it came out, I think it got generally

good reviews. They do got very good reviews.

The movie that Columbia thought was going to be the big hit

which was Silverado made about half of what Fright Night did.

Fright Night was like a big box office success to everybody's surprise.

It reminds me if you take a little child

and you throw it up in the air, it gets this

terrible, horrible, fearful look on its face

and almost maybe cries and then you catch it.

And once it knows it's caught and say it starts to laugh immediately.

This is humor, fear, mix. And I think that

happens in Fright Night in a very unique way.

The real horror movie buffs will get their goods.

You can actually get involved with the characters

and at the same time it'll scare your socks off.

When you're working on a movie, it's not this kind of romantic

kind of atmosphere. It's really a technical sort of experience.

But when you see it all come together, it was really, really a great experience.

And I remember walking out of the theater and people

reacting to seeing me as if I was still that character.

You really believe me, you poor dope!

That really freaked me out. I said no, no, no, no, that was

just a character in the movie. I'm not really like that.

There are no such things as vampires through cake.

Overall, I was really pleased and enjoyed the film a great deal.

And much to my surprise is I'm sitting there watching

the credits go by, I got a credit on the film.

After all that, you know, so that was pleasing.

And I was grateful to Tom Holland and Richard Edel

and everyone involved who made sure I got that credit.

I got their message.

After my sensational success in Fright Night, it was a foregone

conclusion that they would ask me back to reprise my role in a sequel.

With their heroes secured, they had to decide which of the

rest of the cast would be recalled to fight evil with me.

We heard that there was going to be a sequel.

And at the time, I'm not sure the exact chronology, but I do

know that Tom and I subsequently worked on Charles Play Together.

When there was talk about the sequel, we actually had a

reading of the first draft of the script and Amy was in that.

Tom was not attached to direct, he was not attached to the project at all.

And I think he'd probably gone on to start his Chuck E franchise.

The Fright Night sequel I went to see because Bill was in it.

And I enjoyed it. I thought it was a good film.

It didn't stack up to the original of me, but that was okay.

I mean, I didn't expect it to or I didn't really have any expectations of it.

My memories of the sequel to Fright Night are very vague because

I wasn't really involved in any of the negotiations for it.

I don't recall being asked to be involved.

I knew Tom wasn't doing it. And so it didn't happen.

I was contractually obliged to do Fright Night too.

And I had to get out of it somehow.

I mean, I would have done it, but it was cute.

They had a draft of a script and we had a reading.

And then it just went away.

And I didn't hear anything more about it.

I went on to do this little television show that I stayed with for about 10 years.

And in that time, another script surfaced.

And this time, it did not have Amy's character.

I mean, I would have liked to have continued

with that character because I love her.

But it wasn't Tom.

And it's that sort of lightning and a bottle sort of thing.

Not sure that the second one, nor the remake version

really had that lightning strikes two times or three times.

Quality to it.

The End

Already a key element in the John Carpenter

horror film making machine, Tommy Lee Wallace,

would attempt to fill the boots of my dear friend Tom Holland,

as director and co-writer of Fright Night Part 2 born in Kentucky in 1949.

Wallace had already established himself as an accomplished director on Halloween 3.

Season of the witch.

You get jobs one of two ways.

Either the system kind of steers someone towards you

and perhaps your agent goes out and finds the job.

In other words, the structure of the business causes a job

to come your way and you go and do the traditional interview.

And maybe you get the job and maybe you don't.

And then there's this other way that happens more often

than not, which is you know somebody who knows somebody.

And then you happen to know somebody else, you know somebody else.

And those two people meet in the parking lot and your name

comes up and suddenly you've got an inside track to the job.

I think my anointment, if you will, on Fright Night Part 2 probably came about

more because of the second idea where I had a neighbor who became a friend.

His name is Miguel Tejada Flores, who was one of

the co-writers of the sequel script originally.

And Miguel had knowledge of this script. He knew I was getting a reputation

for scary movies and kind of had the right pedigree for his boss, herb Jaffy.

I was really taken by how he was able to juggle 20 plates at the same time.

I mean with high-style glamour, vampire heart

on a low budget, he was really beautifully,

very gracefully juggling a lot of complex

questions thrown at him all at the same time.

I knew that in the carcass of your thesis, I met with him of course for the

you know before signing on and he seemed to have a very clear vision as well.

It started with Tommy being very involved in wanting relationships clear

between the characters at the same time, affection between the characters.

And incredibly open to any ideas that we would have regarding the

individuality and what would separate our characters from the other characters.

I remember just wow, love what you do, have fun with

it and make movies, yeah I'm in the right business.

And Tommy, we also gave me that feeling when I was pretty

young and to this day I do recall some of this, oh remember I,

yeah you know so you take something from everybody and I

take that working in this business is fun from Tommy Wallace.

I believe it was the first sequel I had ever

done. But it was interesting for me because

here I was kind of invited to take the ride in

a sense again except it was a different ride,

different director, different material, same underlying

story in a sense. So for me I was challenging myself

to find some freshness in it, to be reminiscent enough

to be familiar to the audience and support it properly.

Tommy Lee knew exactly what he wanted because this was a film

about redemption. It's someone who says I'm cured, I'm all better.

I love this girl, let's do this, what, what was that, oh no, oh no, what's

happening. And now we're, as an audience we're with him, we're easy for it.

And now we're descendant to I don't believe what's happening. It's not happening.

It is happening. Here's proof I got the thing. Oh no, it is happening. I

went by one he has to convince people that it is happening. They get to witness

it. And then it's this heroic journey. In this case it was literally a rescue.

I'd seen Halloween three. We were shooting close

to Halloween, so Brian Wade and I I think we were

like seeing in that you know three more days till

Halloween, you know from the Silver Shamrock songs.

Tommy was good natured about that. The exciting

thing about Tommy Lee Wallace was he was married

to Nancy Luminus from the first Halloween, so

she would cut once or while she would call up.

Oh my god, it's because we all had a crush on her.

I saw Tommy out once I got the gig on Fright

night part two. I saw him out as the director

of the original. I didn't want to get

anything completely wrong that he had set up.

And I just imagined that even if all we talked about was the weather that

somehow being together for a little while could only be a good thing.

We had lunch. He was complimentary about the

script. Basically gave me a salute and off I went.

For Fright night part two, it would take the combined prowess

of Tommy Lee Wallace, Miguel Tejade Flores, Tim Mitchell,

and even the effects go to Jean Warren, Jr. to revamp.

Re...

Re...

Re...

Revamp.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Chris. It's a joke isn't it?

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'll carry on.

To revamp the adventures of the great Peter Vincent and his sidekick Charlie Brewster.

Set three years after the original and not looking a day older

I might add, I was to fight Vampireless, Regine Dandrich.

She sought revenge for the death of her blood sucking sibling, Jerry.

It follows the brilliant original fright night, Tom Holland's Opus.

And it continues the story of Charlie Brewster and his old buddy Peter Vincent.

And so it continues that saga with a new set of vampires, one of whom

is a blood kin of Jerry Dandrich, play greatly by Chris Sarandon.

And it continues that adventure to a logical vampire movie conclusion.

Tommy Lee Wallace was thinking I think of how to service the characters

that had already been established and also broadened up a little bit.

So there were more cultural references outside into the 80s.

It tried to make it a bigger story and add a bit more sex appeal to Charlie and to...

And it's a journey for some reason. I don't know if it's about eternal life or

not wanting to see themselves in a mirror, but people are drawn to vampires.

Or being a vampire. And so this was a continuation of that journey.

And Tommy, he kind of rewrote the script because there

were two other writers that Herb had hired to write too.

And I know I got it early and he had asked me what did I

think of it and I said wow, you know, it's missing a lot

of storytelling stuff and it's a little too much just

vampire stuff that has no human element to bring you in.

And Tommy thought the same thing when he got it.

First of all, you got to think about this in terms of how quickly we were moving.

Writing our little fingertips off and getting this thing together.

You could have taken Christopher Lloyd's character and Michael Day Fox's character.

And you probably could have plugged those two into Fright Night 2.

You have very much a very similar relationship

and you would have had a similar movie.

Both, you know, this seasoned person who's a bit nutty and obviously older, taking the

young naive and curious boy under his wing and introducing him into this new world.

His devotion to the fearless vampire killer

has waned and waxed and now it's back again.

And that's the adventure that interested me because the first one

was a kind of standalone story and sequels are always a journey.

They can't repeat the same story.

We have to go somewhere and then find our way back again.

From returning characters to completely new ones, the casting

process for Fright Night 2 would bring menacingly camp where it was.

Roll-escaping vampires, seductive vampires, is a bug, a bunching, chauffeur and a

completely new love interest for Charlie

Brewster, the delectable Alex to the Silver Squee.

I inherited two great characters, Charlie Brewster and

the fearless vampire killer himself, Peter Vincent.

This pair really held the screen impressively throughout Fright Night.

So I knew unless I screwed up some colossal way that we were already on solid ground.

The thing for me to do was cultivate that relationship, make sure it held steady.

It could have some rocky spots, some ups and downs but they

would finish on the same page and be comrades and arms forever.

I was on tour with a play and my agent called and said

would you be interested in doing a sequel to Fright Night?

Fright Night, and I said yeah of course I love to.

Let me see the scripts until they sent me the scripts.

And I noticed Chris wasn't in it which I wasn't

expecting but then I guess how could he be

because Fright Night was in it and Julie Carmen

was going to be in it which I was excited about.

So I signed on and said yes.

It was very much a cat and mouse relationship

and I just loved to play with him.

Bowling?

Bowling alone, you know those kind of moments in the movie were planted

there to help reinforce the fact that he's a weirdo, he's our weirdo.

We love him. Bill Ragsdale acted that quality and certainly

characters carries a little bit of that quality himself.

Fright Night, who do you think?

I know what you're saying.

There was no alumni, no one coming back from the first one and no one

really to speak of it so it was a franchise without a continuation.

And I can't imagine Mark Campbell not being in other Star Wars.

It just wouldn't happen but Fright Night did and Roddy was the link.

We were very familiar with each other, we knew each other's performance tempo.

We were socially familiar with each other too, we were friends by that point

so it was great fun to just get to hang out with him again and do our thing.

The thing that separates Fright Night 2 from

all those other films is Roddy McDowell.

You don't know whether he's just a paranoid guy or he's a vampire slayer

and at the same time he offers a very tongue and cheek a little bit.

He throws stuff away, it's very quick and so sometimes when you watch

it over and over again you start to get the essence of what he's doing.

There's really no one like Roddy McDowell

now. I can't think of anybody that's like him.

He had such a unique combination, so much a product of the

era and had he been a child actor and then long, long career.

I think that he's one of those people that had to act.

No one has anything bad to say about Roddy McDowell.

He was very, very diplomatic and kind and complimentary,

extraordinarily elegant and there was a lightness about him.

He wasn't slumming doing this kind of B-movie horror gig. He brought

his entire talent to it, took it seriously, showed respect to everybody.

He was always well prepared. If he had a problem, he stuck it right out there.

I do remember one time we're watching Daly's. It was like a profile shot and he's

big close up and he forgets his line and he asked the script person for the line.

But he doesn't break character. He's got one of these

Roddy McDowell expressions or whatever in his mouth open.

But he just, you know, without like a ventrologist, he's just

like a line and she gives him the line and then he moves on.

So like that whole take was usable even when he's asking

for the line, they could just take that sound out.

Whereas a more novice actor would be like,

oh, I screwed up. I'm sorry, what was my line?

So I was just very impressed with that.

You're always a little bit chuckodacious when someone has star power.

And at the cast's read through, you met this remarkably engaged person with you.

He turned, he gave you his sparkling eyes and

his kindness and immediately was welcoming.

Immediately, he gave you a space as a person and as

an actor and I had a great deal of affection for him.

I remember specifically Roddy McDowell saying,

you know, I have a tendency to be hami.

You know, just just make, just keep an eye on that. Because

all I ask is keep an eye on it and don't let me be fake.

Don't let me, don't let me ham it up too much. Bring me

down. If you see that, I want to stay as real as I can

and yet at the same time be in the character which I

was, that was my first idea as an actor of having a dial.

I was such a huge fan of his. I mean, come on Cornelius, one of

the apes, I was like my god, you know, he's a vampire killer now.

Roddy was such a polite and light kind of character that the

darkness had to come from surrounding him with other elements

and with the cape and the deer stalker cap and so on. It

was an adventure for him where it was kind of a tragedy

and down the rabbit hole am I ever going to come out?

On Roddy McDowell my two cents. Well, how about two thumbs up. I

mean, he was a sweet man and had a great relationship with him.

I'm glad I got to double him and so many shots in that movie.

The assignment was then okay, who were the bad guys? It's what about a bad gal,

you know. Let's make a really sexy and come on people. Vampires are about sex.

Regine needed a very particular kind of woman to pull it off. This is a

character that needs to feel universal, not grounded in any particular geography.

Seductive is hell, but not necessarily in an obvious way. She

knows she's alluring, Charlie knows she's coming on to him.

I looked at the script and it's had a very kind of archetypal vampire and I

basically turned it down and I said, is there a way to humanize the character?

She just seemed a little bit too comic book in a vampire way.

She really seemed just right for the role. She has that

international sort of quality. I'm not sure what her ethnicity is.

It just seems universal, beautiful woman, not a girl, woman.

She was steamy, she was very sexy and attractive and sultry. She had

that voice too, it wasn't just her look. She had this kind of soft thing.

Sorry to wake you, I must have the wrong dormant to her.

I just started cracking every facade that

you had and it was really, really, very good.

I didn't know Tom Holland before we shot Fright Night part two and

after it came out, my husband knew Tom, he knew his agent actually.

We went to his house for a party, he's got a great house.

I heard someone he was talking about Fright night two and

I said, didn't like the film. He said, did you see it?

I said, what, I played Virginia. He said, but

an African American woman played Virginia.

I realized then that all of my ethnic mix shows up on film in a wonderful way

because I look so different no matter what the light is, what the camera angle is.

My great-grandfather was Cuban, so I have that Cuban which

has African blood in it and all of that came through.

I think that it's perfect for the regime character because she's 2,000

years old and she has all these different ethnic and cultural influences.

I like that about the character.

She became more of like a mother. She was like the mother to the group.

In a way, the best thing I could do with Julie was listen very

carefully and then just get out of the way and let her do her magic.

Now it wasn't just the good guy against the bad guy, it

was this, you know, there was kind of a sexual thing.

Charlie had grown up a bit and to have the repulsion and

the attraction going on at the same time was fun to play.

Did she know about that?

About the vampires, Mr. Vincent.

We wanted to put a stabilizing female force in

there and that's where Tracy Lynn came from.

She was being Charlie's new girlfriend, Alex, who presumably he met

on that college campus or somewhere nearby in therapy or something.

I didn't at the time feel the need to explain to Thurley where she came

from. She's his girlfriend so she came from where all girlfriends come from.

The girlfriend place.

Tom Cruise has a different new love in every mission

possible, you know, or James Bond or that stuff.

She's out with the old and with the new, I guess. It's brutal.

She was the rationale, she was the scientific

reminder, she was a psychology student.

And I think that Tracy was looking at some things that

Charlie Brewster was saying and wondering if he was all there.

So I think that in a real clinical way, Tracy held a through line for reality.

I thought that Tracy filled out the chemistry very nicely.

He said, lovely actress, easy presence and a stabilizing force for Charlie.

Charlie is a weird character when you stop and think about it.

He's got a lot of quirks and I thought one of the reasons she

was there were to allow an audience to see Charlie as a weirdo.

But that's okay because he's got a beautiful girlfriend who's the

smartest person in the room and she thinks he's okay so he must be okay.

I found her incredibly attractive, you know, Tracy.

So it became easy and she was cheeky. She was always cheeky.

Kind of in her character a little bit but on set she was

so it just opened the door to be a little more playful.

And you know, for me is my character wishing

that I were mortal instead of immortal, you know,

because she was hot.

Alex and Charlie are both older, they're in college, they're

a little steamier and not quite as innocent as the original.

And she was great. She was a beautiful charming comedic actress.

There had been a script around that featured evil ed as the chief antagonist.

It was determined pretty early that we wanted to go in a different direction.

Evil certainly seemed prime to come back for the sequel

but he had a, I guess, a conflict, a working conflict.

To be honest, I didn't get that same feeling

reading the script to Fright Night 2.

I planned on doing it, you know, and I told my agent,

sure, you know, I'm not doing anything else right now.

But at pretty much the same time I was offered another movie, 976 Evil,

which I knew was going to be directed by Robert England.

And I read that script and it was by far my preference of the two.

And I chose to do that.

I never knew that Louis was like the replacement for Evil Ed from the first one.

I always found Evil Ed just annoying as I'll get out.

Sorry. Stephen did such a great job with the role that in a way I would

have felt a little bit saddled by him if I'd had to go down that road.

So I was a little relieved when the decision

came down that we'd go in a different direction.

I never considered that I was like some kind of replacement to that.

I always saw Louis as he was the shortest version of Vampire.

He was like the newest of the new recruits.

Louis still has like, he still has the desires of the flesh.

Of course, that's why he's like all about Tracy.

And so when I went in and read for the movie,

that's kind of why I was planning on kind of goofy.

You know, like, I don't think that that was really the way he was originally written.

I think we kind of we built that as we went along.

I mean, there was definitely a side to him that was there.

But I think that it just went a little more so.

He didn't jive with that whole thing.

He was like, oh, that's true.

I got this other thing that I am old.

Anybody is that?

Yeah, yeah. I'm a vampire.

You know, I felt like that was not really what he wanted to do.

He never wanted to be that.

He wanted to just be, he was still kind of wanting

to get back to the other side a little bit.

John was a funny, you know, a comedic guy and brought a lot of that to it.

You know, it's sort of goofy, how doggish aspect to the wolf man character.

Hydro-mena.

Nublio Fasiata.

Fah is the bug man who drove the getaway car you could say.

That doesn't vote the kind of humor that I'm

fond of, which is, okay, we mean business.

This is a scary movie and these people will kill you.

But you're going to have quite a few laughs along the way.

It's not out in out comedy, but it's that delicate balance.

It took one interview.

Tommy was pretty much on board with having Brian play BOSS.

His first name is Brian because his character

BOSS was based to some degree in a comedy.

It's to some degree in a surface way on Brian BOSSworth.

At the time Brian BOSSworth was a very famous professional football player.

Had a, had the spiked hair, had high cheekbone muscular dude.

Who had, they'd not have latched on the name BOSS and BOSSworth in the script.

I possibly, they would have cast somebody else, but we had similarities.

And I think they nudged them in the direction of that look.

I just thought that was a dazzling sort of character

to send up, you know, and make into a bad guy.

One of the things that Tommy had to ask me in the interview was,

Brian, are you going to be comfortable, you're handing insects.

Do you think you'd be okay with putting them in your mouth?

I'm like, I think I'm going to be okay with it.

There's some people that present themselves in such a way that you, oh yeah, yeah.

That is an actor. That person is like showing up. We know who they are.

He shows up. He's like this guy.

And he puts on his wardrobe.

And he starts speaking a little bit differently.

And he starts doing everything. So he was kind

of a surprised to me how effective he was.

I really liked the character choice. He made it was kind

of sophisticated and, you know, and a tasteful kind of guy.

I remember feeling kind of bad for ever thinking, I hope this guy's got the chops.

You know, when we first started, I didn't know. I mean, when I first met him

or when we were, I was like, I wonder, he's got such an interesting look.

Is that what he's hired for? Is he? And no, it

was this incredible talent. He's very talented.

I said, what if before he eats these parts

that he says they're genius and species name?

And thereby we know he's a connoisseur. And Tom is like, yes, we're doing it.

So I went and got all the genius and species of all the bugs that we were

actually going to have, which were different from the ones in the script.

And it became a really memorable part of his character in a part of the movie.

Because I got people come up to me and imitate

me saying the name and dropping whatever.

After or after not, not die and dropping.

I just had an image of my mind of him wretching.

I think he wretched a couple times and I

don't think he'd ever want to say that he did.

But I think he wretched. He put like bugs to his mouth and almost bombeted,

you know, having them in there while we're waiting to get the camera rolling.

Put him in the mouth was not as odd as I thought. I'm

positive that my ancestors were bug munchers positive.

And maybe some of the recessive DNA was surfacing in buzz.

I was antagonizing him all the time, trying to always find him.

I can find a way to make him uncomfortable.

Because that's like what that was the dynamic that just happened there.

I don't think that was definitely not

written. It was just us, you know, go for it.

It was great. There was an undrogyny, you know, and a placefulness,

a balladic, you know, kind of what is this type of thing.

I think probably we were together through the ages for a while.

You couldn't tell if he was male, female, he was really going

for that mid-1980s, gender neutral feel and extremely elegant.

It worked as part of it was the 80s, you know, you could do that. You

could go around on roller blades and hair extensions. We all did it.

Russell Clark was Michael Jackson's choreographer when I met him and

we rented a studio, a moral land a studio, and a interpretable of art.

We met there every day, six, eight hours, hardcore dance rehearsal.

Russell was always kind of royalty a little bit.

When he talked about movement and giving instruction,

there is a sense of history when a master is

speaking, and when they know exactly what they're talking

about with zero doubt, Russell certainly had that.

Well, there was a lot more of cinematic ballet, of choreographed camera

moves that were designed to draw people in. The music, the dance.

It was important to have a choreography presence, not just the dancing, the obvious

dancing, like the dressed in red, number, but just in vampire movement as well.

If people watch closely, they'll see that the force some moves

as a unit in a coordinated way. It isn't just accidental.

What is it I remember the most from Fright

Night 2? It's a very simple, beautiful image.

Russell flying down that walkway on his roller blades,

stretched out, gliding through the air on his roller blades.

I really give enormous amount of credit to Russell Clark, the choreographer,

and he's a huge loss in Hollywood, and I'm really sad he's not with us anymore.

The character of Merit Butric, there's a scene where Russell

Clark's character and I both attack Merit Butric at the same time.

It's a great job as my friend and non-believer until

it was too late. I try to tell him and I'll listen.

He spoke with everyone about the fact that he had end stage aides.

This was in 1987, when no one knew that much about contagion factors.

The makeup department was bending over backwards to make sure that when my fangs

ripped into his wrist that it wasn't touched and everything was sterilized.

He really wanted the role as his last piece of footage

knowing that he was dying, but it was also kind of awkward.

No one wanted to be worried about their own health in front of him because

there was just so little known then, but that's the last footage of him.

I think you've been under a lot of stress lately.

Ernie Sibela, who was very funny and was perfect for the role

of my psychologist at the very beginning of the sequel, is

sort of talking me through giving the audience and me the

reasons to believe why the first movie kind of never happened.

That's the starting point for the second film.

Back off.

What? Your Peter Vincent? The bear's fat pirate killer? Oh, you're a star!

I was reading for the part that Jonathan Grise got,

just like in River Zez I was reading for the part

that Keanu Reeves got, and just like in Heathers I

was reading for the part that Christian Slater got.

We were there for the final callback and so

as a consolation they offered him that role.

We don't believe when I auditioned that I did any of the stuff

that I did on screen, which tends to a lot of times be the case.

So that when I got on set, Tommy Lee Wallace was so cool and we went

through it and we rehearsed and I started, because it was like he's mopping.

So when you're mopping, you can either say nothing and mop or you can just ramble on.

And so he let me and then as I was making him laugh, he

just kept letting me go so it was like a snowball effect.

He thought he was really, really good in that part. I mean I really

loved what he did. He took a nothing role and turned it into something.

Joshua Rissman was a, I hate to say I had to cliche the breath and fresh air.

One of the great things about Fright night two for me was that I wasn't the ornamental

degenerate who smoked cigarettes and talked

tough and wore all his own rock and roll clothes.

And you know, which is a lot of times they liked that about me and

then they would say like, well leave your clothes with wardrobe.

And then they were nervous that I would lose it and continuity

be all screwed. But this was cool. I got to put on an outfit.

I got to do something completely different than what

I had done before. And Tommy Lee Wallace was so cool.

He's obviously on screen. He let me do whatever I wanted.

He was crazy. He does this kind of crazy antics.

Like he was kind of like a short tiny Tim.

He had this kind of weird proto neo Adam Sandler, Saturday Night Live

kind of voice. And he just lit up the whole crew and kept us going.

At the time my friend Bob Downey and I had this sort of other language that

we literally spoke in daily and nightly and like you would see us out in L.A.

If you were like this whirlwind of two these two lunatics just rolled by

and a lot of that diatribe and banter is what that fritzy craziness is.

And I figured this was going to be my one shot to get that up on screen forever.

Everybody remembers him. Like as usually as a case of Hollywood, who was

that guy? What was his name? Oh yeah, that guy. And what's the thing?

And that's he's that guy. I mean, people want remembers

name necessarily didn't go on to be a character actor.

But you had a lot of snap and a lot of style. None

of us had expected. I really walked everybody up.

With cast and crew and script completed, it

was time for principal photography to begin.

Locations in Hollywood and Palm Beach Beckoned the Fright Night Magic.

They much anticipated exploits of Peter Vincent

in Fright Night 2, or finally coming to life.

Thanks to the creative vision of Tommy Lee

Wallace, helped by cinematographer Mark Irwin fresh

from his own success on David Cronenberg's

classics such as The Fly, Video Drome and Scanners.

Working for this to pictures was a dream come true for a

young filmmaker like myself because I was spoiled rotten.

What I remember from Fright Night was Tommy Lee's tunnel vision

in terms of here's the story and there's endless distractions.

And maybe there's the sighting of Chris Sarandon on the set.

Who knows?

John Carpenter's approach to filmmaking was, hey, I'm going to make

movie deals with people who can't say no because I'm doing it so cheap.

And my only requirements are going to be that I get total control.

It's like, okay, and I watched how that worked out because there is

a dynamic about filmmaking that says somebody needs to be in charge.

We shot mostly location stuff just all over Los Angeles.

There's a big party scene which we shot in an old 1930s hotel in Long Beach.

Peter Vincent's house was an apartment in Hollywood.

So we were kind of all over for that one.

It was a place of grandeur, had a big boardwalk, a lot of grand

apartment buildings so that was where we did a lot of the interiors.

Mark Irwin was fantastic.

I came up through a fairly stratified system

of sort of even though a lot of it was

non-union, it was union structure that is to say, you had category for everything.

And I leaped from doing 10 jobs on Halloween to a kind of understanding

that no, you can't pick up that hammer unless you're in that union.

Didn't like that structure.

And yet it was a system that had yielded great results for me in the camera

department of having a director of photography and a camera operator.

Two separate jobs. Two big jobs, two.

I was lucky in 1986 and 87.

I didn't know at the time that that was the last film

I would shoot for David Cronenberg, which was the fly.

But I had done the Dead Zone and Scanners and

Video Drome and the Brune and lots of horror films.

I lived in Toronto at that time, by the way in Canada, and I had an agent.

And the fly came out and he said, you know, if there's

ever a time for you to move to Hollywood, this is the time.

Going to location on Fright night part two

was exciting for me because again I was young.

I kind of got full access to things because of the visual effects part of what

we were doing and the friendship between Tommy Lee and my father and Marguerun.

I just watched Marguerun light all the time.

There are restrictions to how late you can shoot, so suddenly, oh

yeah, we have all these things, but we've got to be done in 20 minutes.

What?

It seemed like the town was our oyster and we opened it up and

just explored all sorts of locations and built a bunch of sets.

It was truly a family feel.

The film company was a boutique company run by Herb

Jaffee who had produced the original Fright night.

He was an avuncular kind of person and truly did feel like your favorite uncle.

He ran his company by good nature, not like a dictator.

And that filtered right down through.

A lot of fun, a lot of contemporary, a few who were

older friends on the set with me or behind the scenes.

And the cutting room was right there in the same

building as Vista Pictures out on Sunset Boulevard.

So the whole thing had a very local, very family friendly feel to it.

No Horacee Quill would be complete without a preponderance of special effects.

And Fright night too was to be no different.

At the helm, practical effects wizard Greg

Canem and visual effects guru Jean Warren Jr.

and his special effects company Fantasy 2 Effects.

In their safe hands, monstrous ideas became chilling realities.

In time, these effects became as applauded as the original movie.

And that was no mean feat.

I can tell you.

Would you like a drink there?

There you go.

We worked primarily and mostly with an outfit called Fantasy 2.

Jean and Leslie Warren out in the San Fernando Valley.

It was in a horse stable and funky everywhere you turned.

Funky little, makeshift, wooden beams, nailed back up for the 20th time.

And nothing slick about it, which is my kind of world.

Coming from a family visual effects company, we got to do everything.

Because it was always a closely knit group of people.

I mean, look, Brett and Bart, twin brothers.

We were a family business.

I really love working with both of them.

Terrific guys.

The type of work that I do is strictly post-production.

I'm usually just involved after the film has been shot.

But since the company was also doing the makeup effects,

I was able to visit the day they were doing the big party scene and the apartment.

Because there had been talk at one point about my brother and I since we were twins,

they thought it might find or interesting to put us in the film.

But it didn't work out.

We didn't make it in there.

Bart's twin brother, Brett.

Ran, our Roto department, that fed opticals.

The sequence in the elevator where you have these

mirrors using to reflect the sun were optical effects.

And the rays were created in roto.

And then were optical compositing to the film.

My son, Chris, worked on it.

And then we worked with Mad Effects, which were based in our studio,

which was Bruce Block and Ken Marchelle,

because there's a couple of Mad paintings in the movie.

They're kind of unique since it was squeezed.

The picture was in scope.

Most of the films I'd ever done had been practical effects.

And most of the films that I'd ever done only had a budget for practical effects.

So when we did Fright Night Part 2,

a lot of what we saw with people's eyes were

a few opticals that were added in the ballast.

But if somebody was going to have weird eyes,

they were going to put in contact lenses, just weird bizarre contact lenses.

The bowling alley scene was a fun one.

My main contribution to that was the bowling ball head, the buzz worth head.

I remember when we did do the life cast.

This guy shows up.

He had very little hair anyway, just like he was

bald, except for like a little band across the back.

I didn't want to cover it with a bald cap, just have to sculpt it off again later.

We took probably his hand lotion, like massage it into his hair.

And then when we took the life cast, we massage the alginate into the hair,

which normally you don't want to get it in hair because it grabs and locks up.

But because his hair is so short, and we slicked it up,

it just pulled right out of the alginate.

So we had this beautiful cast of his bald head.

We did it what John Carpenter and I used to call Little Rascal's style.

There are several ways to do it.

Millions of dollars and all unscheduled during the shoot.

Or stretched out over the course of several weeks on a shoestring budget

with you and your friends and Scotch tape and chewing gum.

I always prefer that second version.

Julie, for some reason I remember we did our initial life cast

and we had a problem with it.

I didn't like it at all.

And when I got home, I burst into tears,

just kind of let the steam out and the phone rang.

And it was Bart Mixen and Brian Wade.

And they said, I'm sorry to tell you this,

but there's a chip in the nose.

You have to come back tomorrow and do it again.

She wasn't thrilled about which I can understand.

I mean, that's not the most pleasant part of the experience.

So when they poured the plaster cast over my face,

they had two straws coming out of my nose.

And my hair was down to my waist and they

tied it to a sprinkler system on the ceiling.

And poured this plaster in the 80s, that stuff dried really slowly.

So I got a bit claustrophobic and a little panicked

because you feel like you're not, you can't breathe.

In terms of her super regime look,

which was like a three piece prosthetic,

it was like a wraparound chin jaw, nose and a forehead,

and a lace front and some brows.

I think we put her in that three times.

We did her for the dance in her apartment.

There's the visual effect where she's swinging the cross

and she changes back and forth.

That was done in fantasy too.

Every time the crucifix came towards my face,

my face would morph into more vampire features

and they wanted it to feel that it was from the inside out.

And then when the cross swung away like a pendulum,

my face would go back to normal.

They had to build the mass.

Like a motion control rig where they had her like seated in a piece

that held her head steady and all that.

They had to use this stuff that smelled like gasoline

to get the prosthetic make-up off.

And it was the end of the day everyone was tired

and I would give the make-up artist a hundred dollar bill

to go slowly because it felt like it was being ripped, ripped, ripped, ripped.

And he can't just rip it off.

I've worked with a lot of guys that it's not their favorite thing to do,

but at least they're like, that's what I'm here for.

So let's do it.

And with her again, it was only three times.

So, you know, it wasn't, I don't think it was that big of a deal.

Working with prosthetic make-up is a challenge

and I swore to never do it again.

That was the last film that I did it.

The only other make-up we did on her at the end of the show

when she gets hit with the sunlight, in pre-production,

we were told we didn't need any prosthetics for her.

We get there on set and they're like,

maybe we want some blistered flesh.

So, Jim McLaughlin and Aaron Sims were helping me on set at that point.

And so Jim and I did a little gelatin business,

just gel effects, build up on her hands and her face.

There's a senior at the end when he's trying to stake her gene

and she opens her eyes.

She kind of hypnotizes him and his eyes glow red.

I was just done with the animation.

It's the couple little red eye glows.

Ah!

Mmm!

Mmm!

Up to that point, it seems like all the holy water stuff was more,

like acid burns.

And I wanted more of like swollen blistery type stuff.

So at least I wanted it to be a little different.

The two-piece makeup is the one part of the face.

It's all screwed up and then the aftermath of the throat splitting.

I also built the dummy head that we used in Fantasy II

and insert post-production for the actual shots of the water.

Hitting him in the mouth.

We applied the makeup to the actor, did a life cast,

and then a dummy head from that.

That we pumped the trichlorothane into the foam.

So it's a chemical that attacks foam latex and causes it to swell.

So we had that pumping in the cheeks and the throat.

The throat of the puppet had like little barn doors that could open

for all the water to come out.

And I think we had blood tubes in there for where the splits were.

And it was like a pet and shoulders pumping.

There were six of us, you know, a couple of us puppeteering

and the guys pumping fluids.

The holy water starts burning and the smoke comes off his face.

So that was done similar to the fire.

It was, they shot just a smoke element against black and matted that.

I finally had to kind of step in with the camera angles,

like the first time they shot it.

Everything else in that sequence is shot like this.

And then when they shoot the puppet, they're like the camera for some reason

was like down on the level, like looking up at it.

And then they get the daily's back and they're like,

it doesn't look like the actor.

It's like looking up his nose.

He had kind of receding hairline.

And you know, from that angle, he looked like it was bald.

And I was like, why aren't we shooting it up?

You know, so once they moved up there, then it matched, you know, much better.

That's cool.

I don't like him either.

I don't know how to see the finish face.

And thinking, I don't know what this is.

I can't tell.

It's supposed to be a wolf.

I mean, I remember the character for me, you

know, was not what I thought it was going to be.

I remember thinking, this is an interesting concept.

I thought the guy was going to look more like like the big bad wolf.

Because I always thought the film was as much comedy as it was horror.

There was a transformation you never saw.

Because eventually that cut out of the picture.

I never thought really was great because it didn't have any punch.

But it was, the gag was already over when the werewolf climbs up the building,

he's peaking in and then she goes and closes

the window and chops off his nails and he falls.

And that's the gag.

There was a transformation of him transforming back

to the human form and eventually he got cut out.

Where the werewolf falls to his death in the fountain.

They had some coverage on the location with stuntman in the werewolf suit jumping off.

But they needed an overhead shot looking straight down at the fountain.

And so we did a blue screen with the werewolf.

It just happened that Gene Warren was a stuntman himself.

Then he was a championship diver.

He had to fall face down flat.

And do that.

You couldn't do this.

He insisted on doing that stunt himself.

So Greg Canem put him in the werewolf suit and they set up a big giant airbag.

It was probably about a 30 or 40 foot jump.

And everyone was scared to death but he was going to break his neck or something.

People he had, they could only do that.

And well you got to start doing that way up.

So you wouldn't get this long fall face down like that and then turn like that.

Took a diver or a tumbler to be able to do that.

Well I could do that.

So he let me do it.

And we set it up and we did it.

Since I wanted to be a stuntman originally it was like, not I was happy.

I'm happy now.

Nobody else really knew it.

But I did.

I just said, well you know I obviously if you're going

to get a vampire you got to get them in the heart.

So I just said, how about if I just say, oh my dude.

And he was like, that's it.

Just say it.

So I land in the water and look up and go, oh my.

To prepare for the bugs that come out, we had to load the chambers of the supply.

So it was a big fake belly that they had the slits in.

And luckily the smart maker of the appliance

laid a entire latex skin on top of my skin.

So the bugs didn't have to stay in there and scratch around.

If you put a maggot in a confined type

latex space they start going crazy in there.

So they do pack these things in there.

And I have to stay hunched over like this.

How many maggots were in that freaking appliance?

Dozens.

Probably wasn't 100 but it was dozens.

So I'm whole because that holds the gaps together.

When I did this they would open up.

And so I had to stay like this.

And I had dozens of maggots doing this in there.

And while we're waiting to roll the muscles, the

exterior muscles of my stomach started to spasm.

Not from having to hold the area but it was somehow

the maggots made them electrical charge or something.

But it was just the oddest, strangest muscle twitching that has ever gone on.

And I don't know if it was some mental thing from feeling them being in there.

There was some actual transfer.

But luckily we got it done with one take.

We had made some hands for Bell when he rips Bosworth's stomach open.

They were rigid plastic hands with razor

blades in the nails to cut the stomach open.

So I borrowed some hand casts from Rick Baker.

So those are Rick Baker's hands that we stab him in the stomach with.

There's a rule in Hollywood that you never act with children and animals.

And when you have animals you have to have animal wranglers.

I guess you have child wranglers here but they're called parents and teachers.

When you act with bugs, you have bug.

I think it was called bug wrangler on the call sheet.

He was a guy that probably had hygiene similar to the insects.

You know, not exactly knowing where the next shower was.

Facial hair indiscriminately growing in odd places.

We're going to try somebody on this bluerid.

But no, he was somebody that you looked at and knew that his

social skills were not going to get em voted most congenial.

One morning we arrived and the beetle, the one with a sharpie driven on it.

He obviously had spent the night on the film set from the night before.

He's asleep in this beetle.

He's back there.

And right here is a box full of cockroaches.

Right here is this little clear plastic tear full of maggots.

And he's just like sleeping away with all these insects around his head.

We did Bell's meltdown at the end and melt.

So that was like a wax skull with a gelatin skin that we cast up.

It was done in an oven, threw a piece of glass, turned the oven on.

It was like 15 second exposures and then the shutter

would be closed just for like a fraction of a second.

And then it would do another 15 second exposure.

So everything kind of flowed down.

And then we had to do something like that.

And that's why you get that jumpy kind of pixelated

look because half your action the shutter is closed.

But by gene keeping it open and just closing the shutter for such a short time,

then everything looked more organic and

almost looks like an oil painting or something

the way everything is just melting.

Very similar to what we did in the past, but it was like a real thing.

It was like a real thing.

It was like a real thing.

It almost looks like an oil painting or something, the way everything is melting.

Very similar to how the wilting flowers wilted and grapeseed were drakula,

which we ended up doing later.

So when Roman asked us, oh, we've done that.

We would come and turn into the bat.

We did have some conceptual artwork from the production on that,

which we took liberties with.

The main thing that we used from that, it had kind of a,

well, they described as a carapace on its back, which I was always like,

when it's turning into a bat, why's it got a shell on its back?

But to placate and we did that, but we had to

modify the front to look like our bat puppet

and build sturgeon to the initial sculpting on that and then Brian Wade

did the bulk of the finishing and then I jumped in a little bit on that as well.

And a lot of these over the head mask type characters like this,

they'd have like the teeth and stuff, but they'd always

have like a black cloth in the back of the mouth,

which if they open the mouth wrong, then you

just, there wasn't much depth in the mouth.

So the main thing I wanted was that was to open her mouth that you could see,

like down her throat, so we actually came up

with a way to have the teeth on the outside

and then attached to dentures that clipped over her teeth.

So when her mouth was open, you were seeing like literally down her throat,

her lower teeth were hidden by the tongue and the mask

that was also like on dentures that clipped on that.

We had done a film where Catherine Bigelow called in your dark.

And at the end of that film, the vampires burst in the flame.

They had filmed them with the costume smoking and stuff.

It wasn't usually exciting enough.

So Gene Warren came up with this idea.

They would take a dummy and they would match the position of the actor.

They would study how it moved and then they would puppeteer this dummy.

We would do a mock-up of her walking.

It would be maybe a torso and we'd do it on black and we would put the fire on black

and they'd recreate it as it's moving towards us to give the fire some motion.

And then the arm would move up and we would take a fake arm all in black,

let's strings and we'd raise it.

And then the fire would travel with her arm.

So we would recreate her body motions, but in sections for the fire,

so you can individually roto and optical for that piece to fit.

So nothing as a whole would go off beat.

We would recreate those setups, same lens, same distance away from the character.

And it worked so well on near dark that we did the same

thing on fright night with the corpse person in the flame.

The sad part with that makeup was that very little of it ended up in the film.

Like all the promotional stuff and it looks really cool and I was very pleased with it.

I actually sculpted the head for that.

Then it got a lot of optical flames put over it by Fantasy II,

which looked cool that was always the plan.

But I think just in the editing and the sequence,

maybe it wasn't as exciting as they were hoping.

So they kept adding more flame, thinking like that would make it, you know,

like a raging inferno and maybe make it a little more intense.

And unfortunately, just obscuring a lot more

of the makeup than I was hoping it would.

I thought it worked out fine, but just I remember there were some,

there was like a cool head and shoulder shot of her,

kind of writhing that they just put a little

bit of fire on that looked really nice.

And then that ended up being cut for whatever reason.

And I was like crap, you know, there was our one good hero shot.

But it was overall a great experience.

Very happy with the work that my team and I did.

The whole elevator sequence was all miniature.

And I think that was probably about quarter scale, I want to say,

because then they would have been shooting like 96

frames a second to maintain the illusion of size.

That was a fairly big miniature.

I think it was about 20 or 30 feet tall of this for the whole shaft.

I think they shot that out in the parking lot because they had this,

the Jovisco's will set off a fireball at the end that climbed up the shaft.

And I'm pretty sure they didn't do that stage because it catched the place on fire.

I remember having a Xenon, a 10k Xenon that hit

this mirror and let all the way down the shaft.

And I think that shaft was off to the extended.

That was a full body foam suit.

We actually hit the zippers.

I hit zippers up the back so we hit the zippers in the shoulders.

So when you unzipped it, it was the neck of it was big enough to get her in.

Then we'd zip it up, put the mask, blend it off and covered that.

She was in it for like 18 hours.

Unfortunately she had to go to the bathroom, 17 hours into it.

So there's probably a photo of me cutting a hole in the crotch somewhere.

They hired a woman who had a similar body type to mind, but about 80 pounds lighter.

And they hired a musician who is named Diana Cancer.

Dying of cancer, somehow that had an appeal.

Nonetheless, this skin and bones girl was now wearing this weird vampire outfit.

And what a name for being so thin.

And that was so that she could be in the suit at the end.

That was very skeletal.

She's a lead singer from 45 grave that did party time and returned to living dead.

And she was like 95 pounds or something very thin.

So she was perfect for doing a skeleton corpse on.

If music be the food of love, play on.

Give me excess.

No movie masterpiece would be fit to grace the big screen without a score to match.

And this was left in the capable hands of Fright Night veteran Brad Fidel.

Every fan out there knows how important music is.

All you have to do is watch a movie without it to know what.

What losers most of our pieces of work are without a great score.

Fright Night had a great score and so one would have to be a

fool not to pick up the phone and call Brad Fidel for the sequel.

And that is what we did.

And Brad picked up the phone and called Ross Levinson

for a rehash of that fabulous electric violin.

For Fright Night 2, we got to record it with lyrics.

Fright Night soundtrack I put it on with my

vocal because it didn't get to be in the film.

I figured at least it's on the CD.

Then we got a really good singer, Deborah Holland, to do the vocal on it.

And that was fun.

I loved hearing a woman sing in and because Fright Night 2, the vampire was a woman.

So it made total sense.

Deborah Holland, I want her name recognized because she did such a good job.

What great stuff it was.

I supported the movie brilliantly and I'll be forever grateful to Brad and

the entire team that went along with him for coming up with that stuff.

It just made all our jobs easier.

In those years, as far as technology, things were changing very fast.

So what was available to me in my studio, the tools that I had were different.

I think that inherently made the score different

just in terms of the actual quality of the sounds.

The frequency response, the textures of the sounds were more full range.

So with this score and its sequel and with Terminator and its

sequel, there was kind of an opening up of the soundscape.

There was a more kind of, I don't want to say warmth because

I think the original Fright Night had a lot of warmth in it.

But anyway, there was just, there were more tools. So

I think the scores got a little richer in the sense.

That is just a winner of a score, the unmistakable sound.

We added on to that since we were doing a particularly

artistic kind of backdrop with performance

pieces and dance numbers and kind of trying to add

something of our own in the way of originality.

I haven't listened to the score for the sequel in a long time. I don't have

a sense of that film and that score being quite as memorable as the original.

I felt like the second film was a little more scary, scary than the first.

And of course that affected how I approached

the score. And it just because the original

was my first time maybe and it's kind of an

interesting challenge to sustain on a sequel.

Finally released in 1988 and grew saying nearly $3 million.

Fright Night Parts 2 would initially receive

some not so positive and mixed reviews.

However, it was not the on-screen horror

that was to steal the limelight at this time.

It was murder and betrayal most foul that would

prove to be the legacy of the Fright Night

Worlds and would become the excuse the panel

final nail in the release of Fright Night Part 2.

Finally this movie was done thanks to Hercules and efforts by

a lot of people, not the least of Fumus, J-Casady, the editor.

And we were ready to roll and getting it all set for its big debut.

This was on film and so we were going to have a theatrical release.

Herb Jaffee had made a deal with Jose Menendez for distribution

and subsequent video distribution and all the rest.

Roddy and I had a meeting with Mr. Menendez.

Roddy was particularly skeptical.

He wanted to make sure this got distributed

right and not to lost in the shuffle somehow.

So he grilled Menendez over lunch with some good detailed questions

which was very bracing for me because it's a corner of the business.

I didn't have too much knowledge about it at the time.

Roddy was really putting him through the paces and making

sure that he was going to treat this movie right and put

it right out there up front and get the proper release.

And so I went home feeling pretty good about where we were

headed and lo and behold I awoke next morning to the headlines.

Number one in Southern California.

Peace and looking for Modep tonight and the murders

of a prominent show business executive and his wife.

They were found just before midnight last night shot

to death and their exclusive Beverly Hills home.

Jose Menendez and his wife murdered Shotgun to

death and their two sons were the prime suspects.

My phone rang. It was Roddy. Didn't even introduce

himself just said, well I didn't do it. Did you?

No one really knows what happened there. There's

certain, you know, there was a trial and everything.

But he was a Latino studio head and who knows whether

he was guilty of what his sons claimed he did.

It's not a pleasant story. But that fell through.

Unfortunately the release got screwed up. I don't

know all the particulars but the company that

was releasing the film had some kind of problems.

And I think it only played in two theaters nationally. So

that screwed up the distribution just, you know, completely.

Now I guess they were all in chaos. The Menendez brothers

killed Fright Night part two as well as their parents.

It didn't get a release. It was a very

frustrating process that happened after that.

It was a one man operation and that man was very suddenly,

very finally dead. Eric, Lyle, you fucking assholes.

That's what I think of you. He killed my movie.

And you must have projections for down the road

what you're expecting to make at some point.

Do we think 1989 will be a tremendous year?

Despite the tragic murder of Carol Co. Pictures,

Chairman Jose Menendez and the poor release figures,

Fright Night two like a fine wine matured into a cult

classic as much loved today as the original incarnation.

Over the years both films gained the credit they deserved.

And today are much sought after on DVD and Blue Bay.

I think it opened in LA in New York for like a week or something

just to satisfy, you know, whatever obligations they had there.

I mean, this is when summer blockbusters, you know, we're kind of,

that was the target and we just couldn't even compete with that.

They were going for a real subset of the movie going

populist as opposed to, you know, something big, big, big.

And I think it probably suffered because of that.

There hadn't been a lot of press about it. So I was a little

disappointed. I felt like it was going to kind of peed around.

But it made really strong per-screen average. It opened in

many theaters. And it was, in those days the numbers were good.

It was like over $6,000 per screen average if I remember correctly.

I was really pleased with how this film turned out.

That Christmas time, Tommy Leewell, it's I guess, sent mugs to everybody in mine.

He's got a many thanks Tommy Lee on the back. But it says, just

say no. I understand was from a line that I had in 21 Jump Street.

It's what I believe. I've never known because

I've never seen Tommy Lee Wallace again.

So I hope he sees this and reaches out to me and

lets me know that that's exactly what it was.

And if it wasn't, then I'd like to know what his mind was at.

Nonetheless, I still have this relic. This will soon be on eBay for $1,000.

I love Tommy Lee Wallace and I love the cast.

But they didn't have the same level of money. You know,

they didn't have the support from the studio at the time.

You know, and at that moment in time also back

in the, I guess it was late 80s, 87 or 88.

They thought of sequels as making as a way to cash in on the success of the first one.

You'd have an opening weekend and that was it. So really they starved the sequels.

There's a two-sided compliment to the term cult classic.

I think what that means is that it was somewhat neglected at

some point and fans themselves found a way to keep it alive.

With Fright Night Part 2, I think it probably is simply because it never got exposed.

It really didn't get exposed much at all. It didn't

get a proper relief and that's an opera in itself.

It's built that kind of reputation over the first. So I don't think

it was as good as the first one, but you know, most pictures aren't.

But I think it was a lot better than most people thought.

Everybody's asking why isn't there a release

on DVD of Fright Night Part 2. I wish there was.

It'd be nice if they released it anyway. It'd

be nice to walk through, you know, Tarsier.

See, Fright Night Part 2, I might even buy it.

My motto has always been, I don't write them, I just like them.

And what we lit and what I framed and what I

shot has never been seen other than in theaters.

It would be vital if this film and the legacy

of it is to ever continue and to become a

classic beyond just a narrow margin of cult

classic to have a legitimate blue ray release.

And it's an original aspect ratio.

Struck from a decent, you know, negative and hopefully with some cool behind

the scenes commentary from Tommy and, you know, Greg and I or whoever.

Call up people. Let's beat the bushes and see if we can get something going.

When the clamor for the next installment of the Peter Vincent story

became too loud to ignore, it seemed a new adventure was on the cards.

Roddy was setting up and we were going to do a Fright Night 3.

Carolco said in the rights, they went bankrupt. The rights were bought by a

company in Naples, Florida, that does nothing except by the rights to properties.

And then they resell, like it's number of years

later, it's a holding company for patents, basically.

And that's where DreamWorks got the right to remake Fright Night.

And I felt like that they didn't really know where to go with a

story that wouldn't just sort of be repeating the same formula.

I sort of toyed with writing a story for Fright Night 3 where

Charlie has grown up and he works at an insurance company.

He tries to do the best job he can, but he's pretty scarred from it.

And he's had marital problems and family

problems. And then he finds a familiar face.

He sees a vampire. Turns out that the vampire who is Chris, and

he has to join forces to fight another more malevolent group.

For the species of the vampire which I touched on before.

I thought it was kind of interesting, it was a fun treat.

Like every film of its generation, a remake of Fright Night would be inevitable.

How could anyone match the story, characters

and effects of the original movie?

Fright Night the remake would be released in 2011

to moderates critical and box office success.

I can't say I was surprised really. There are certain characters that need a

sense of flair and mystique so often

lacking in the younger generation of actors.

When I was in my peak, there were parts I played that just couldn't be.

I was like, I'm not a bad actor living.

Nobody ever called me from Dreamworks. Nobody ever contacted me. Nobody ever

called me. Nobody invited me to a screening.

Nobody invited me to the premiere.

I don't think that's unusual in Hollywood. John Carpenter says the same

thing. But all of his movies take the money and run and they'll live.

I think it's a great idea to have come full circle now to

where the new millennium, pretty much all are biggest successes

from that period are all being remade by other people without

our involvement or even being asked to be involved with them.

From one angle it's kind of sad and then at the same time it's flattering

that people have taken that stuff to run out of ideas. Let's remake that one.

I had floated through my manager or somebody that maybe a

cameo and it would be fun but it was never materialized.

The remake certainly helped get the name of the original out there. I

thought it was a terribly competent movie. Everybody on it was excellent.

The writing, the acting, the directing. But they could have named it

something else. And it would have just fine as in their vampire movie.

Because it certainly had nothing to do with Fright Night, the original.

The remake quote-unquote that came out fairly

recently in the last couple of years was by the

director and the producer thought very much as a

reimagining of the original rather than a remake.

And one of the reasons why they had asked if

I wanted to somehow be involved in the movie.

Someone enthusiastic, I wanted to read the script and they said,

look, just read the script and tell us what you want to do.

And one of the reasons why I was very enthusiastic about it was

first of all because they were all huge fans of the original.

My first day on the set, Colin Farrell came to my trailer

very nervous with a bottle of very extensive wine.

And a box set of the Carl Dreyer vampire that he just gave to me

and said, I can't tell you how thrilled I am that you're involved.

I watched that movie when I was a kid 50 times with my sister.

I'm nervous about playing Jerry because of your legacy.

But I hope that you're happy that we're doing it and I'm

thrilled that you're here. I mean, you couldn't have been nicer.

There was a more comedic element to the original than there

was in the other horror films that I had been weened on.

And I've probably seen it about 50 or 60 times since over the years 20 to

60. That's a big window but somewhere between 20 to 60 times over the years.

So I was kind of loath to respond favorably to this material,

to this script, to the idea of the reimagination of it.

And I liked it and I was very disappointed that

I liked it so much when I read this version.

What has made Fright night last is the heart and the humor and the charm. It isn't

the violence. I mean, the effects, yes, definitely because the effects are amazing.

But it isn't copious amounts of blood. It isn't meanness. There are scares in their

screens. It is more like a fun house ride than it is like torture porn. It is not.

It's a million miles away. And you know, and

I looked at the poor actors in the renec and

they're terrific. And I felt so sorry for Colin

Farrell because they give him nothing to play.

I mean, because somebody said and you just know that they did, let's

take the vampire from 30 days of night and put him in Fright Night.

Other than the names, you know, it was kind of its own story. I mean,

it touched on similarities, you know. And I actually, I read the

script and I actually liked the idea that was tied to the housing

bust, you know, because these old neighborhoods were going empty.

And, you know, people were just disappearing and you know, you assume

it's an economic reason, but it's actually more sinister than that.

I thought that was kind of nice, nice idea.

I don't think it had much relationship to the first film. You know,

Colin Farrell was dynamic. He's supposedly a big fan of Fright Night one.

The fact that Chris Randon made an appearance that just

made me laugh out loud when I saw it at the theater.

Haven't we been here before? You know, it was just going

through the same thing that happened once that really well.

And, you know, I'm sure it's a good little movie,

but you know, you can't improve on what's been done.

So I hate to use the word, but perfectly called

a Billy Rage. And I said, let's go see it.

So let's go have lunch and then go see it. So okay, so we met for lunch

and then we went to the theater and we were the only ones in the theater.

So I thought, well, I may not be going over too well, but we

watched it. And you know, there's some really good stuff in it.

Again, I think all of the actors in overtrigger, I love Colin

Farrell. I'm a huge Colin Farrell fan. I want to meet him someday.

It was fun to see Chris, you know, doing his little cameo

in it. It was very entertaining. We stood up and applauded.

I think there were three people in the audience, but that's two

thirds of an audience standing up and applauding. So that's good.

So I thought, wouldn't it be fun if I'm one of the people that

Jerry kills, rather than playing a character in the movie?

What if the present Jerry devours the past Jerry and thereby

exercises him from his, from everybody's consciousness?

And so I said, yeah, let me play the guy who

drives up to them on the highway and Jerry

ultimately kills his progenitor, you know, his grandfather or his father or whatever.

Billy and I buy ourselves in the theater

screaming at the top of our lungs, we saw Chris,

you know, just hooting and hollering, you

know, and that of course is a highlight to us.

After 30 years, Fright Night has spawned novelizations, video

games, models, a successful comic book series and a remake.

You're so cool, Brewster. And it still remains

as popular today as it did on its first release.

The story of Fright Night has touched the hearts of millions

of fans and it's legacy like the cold dark spawn of Satan.

Refuses to stay dead.

There's a major legacy it seems around Fright Night. It's fascinating.

It's bigger now than it was then, which is, you know, strange but really, really nice.

There's a kid, there's a young person in high school.

If you were in the horror, you were, you were odd.

And somehow that has really changed. And now you have the convention circuit. You

have collectibles, screen used props have suddenly become very, very valuable.

Fan art is just going nuts. Social media has helped explode it.

I think Fright Night is really endured because

there was something for everybody. You know,

it worked on a lot of different levels that a

lot of horror flicks just are kind of one note.

You know what's going to happen, but I think there was a lot of sparkle to the

film. I think it's the characters that live on it. That's what people relate to.

It's got a certain timeless quality that really holds up.

People look back to those years and you know, have a very warm and squishy

feeling about those oozy, goosey effects, all that stuff pulsating.

And it was a great time and visual effects, and especially in special effects make up.

I have, you know, young crew members come up

and say that, you know, I shot one of their

favorite films. It's really quite rewarding. And

amazing to me is that it transcends generations.

It's memorable because it has its own identity.

It is a phenomenon that there are people still discovering

the movie and that's very gratifying. It's kind of a

dubious honor, but better these movies get recognized late

than not be recognized at all. So I'm grateful for that.

It's nice to see that, you know, so many hundreds of thousands of people

over the world think the same thing by bringing it back a year after year.

To sit around today, 30 years later, and still

be getting hundreds of thousands of emails every

week. You know, I don't think I could be happier

with a film that we were with Fright Night.

I would be riding on the subway in New York, and

suddenly I get somebody to turn and go like this.

And I knew it was from Fright night. It was a

thing about your bad, you're the man, you're the

dude. And from women, the reaction was in a way

very much the opposite, which was kind of dreamy.

Oh God, you're the guy who did the dance in the

movie, and I got that dancing. It's my favorite scene.

I would purposefully not get on the train when kids

were getting out of school because I remember, you

know, they would get on and recognize me and they'd

say, oh my God, that's the guy from Fright Night is he.

And there was a do that laugh, do that laugh. And I'm like, holy shit.

I feel very fortunate. I've had a pretty lucky time in Hollywood

land, and a lot of it had to do with the making of Fright night.

You know, I keep thinking that, you know, one day people

forget about it, but it's the fact that's the opposite.

I, you know, make appearances and go to conventions

and things like that. And people, you know,

introduce me to their four-year-old, five-year-old

child who'd seen the movie, you know, a dozen times.

It's made a print in the cinema world, and long after we're

going, it'll still be here, and I'm very proud to be a part of it.

You know, this is a very rare and extraordinary

part of my life, that I will carry with me forever.

I'm very happy to have been a part of it. I wish

Roddy was here because he would love it, and I'm very

grateful to still be in touch with everybody from the

film and, you know, to still be friends 30 years later.

It's pretty cool. I mean, I feel like this is my second family.

The fans that come up to me are so sincere. They're so...they love something.

They actually love it, you know, and it means something to them in their lives.

I never thought that was going to happen. I don't think anyone's did.

Here I am, low these many years later, still reaping the rewards of

meeting new people and experiencing their experiences of the film.

That one moment in time has been preserved now for generations yet to come.

Fright Night is my gift to the world of horror fans, and I've under this direct

camera. I want to thank all of you so much. I mean, it's just been lovely to me.

And I really appreciate it, and everybody on Fright Night

thanks you, and God bless, and I wish you all the best.

So...

There it is. The story of Fright Night and the

cast and crew who made the magic happen on stage.

Remember, when you hear the screams of the night,

the...howls of the moonlight, the screeches of the vampire,

the great Peter Vincent will always be there to save the day.

So... sleep tight and fear not. But remember to keep an

eye on that new neighbour, and if he does come a knocking,

don't, whatever you do, invite him in.

Lovely. I'm...

I'll tell you what, I'm not going to tell you what I'm going to tell you.

Cut.

You're here.

Feel your skin.

So warm and so neat.

Let's see if you're home and I can't wait for you.

So warm and so sweet, I can't wait for you.

So warm and so sweet, I can't wait for you.

So sweet and so sweet, I can't wait for you.

So warm and so sweet, I can't wait for you.

So warm and so sweet, I can't wait for you.

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