Fright Night

In this remake of the 1985 comedy-horror classic, hot-shot teenager Charley Brewster (Anton Yelchin – Terminator Salvation, Star Trek (2009)) and best friend ‘Evil’ Ed Thompson (Christopher Mintz-Plasse – SuperBad, Role Models, Kick-Ass) begin to suspect Charley’s new neighbour Jerry Dandridge (Colin Farrell) – a nice guy, but with something admittedly off about him - of being responsible for a series of deaths and disappearances that have been plaguing their town. When no one, not even Charley’s girlfriend Amy Peterson (Imogen Poots), believes that Jerry could be a cold-hearted serial killer, they face a problem.

After Charley observes some very strange behaviour by Jerry, he comes to the interesting conclusion that Jerry is a vampire. So Charley is faced with the rather unenviable question: what do I do if my next-door neighbour is a vampire? However, Charley doesn’t have long to decide as his espionage skills are not all they could be; Jerry knows that his secret is no longer safe. Charley now has only one option: he must turn vampire hunter and stop Jerry before he loses everything that is precious to him – his mother, his girlfriend and his life.

With a strong leading cast and award-winning – though relatively unknown – director (Craig Gillespie), Fright Night is a proper vampire horror film – unlike most of the horror films that come out of Hollywood these days, where it appears that obscene amounts of gore are used to compensate for a complete lack of tangible plot and the idea of dramatic tension is as foreign as character development. Not just that, expect some laughs too, especially from David Tennant playing the Van Helsing-esque Peter Vincent – a Las Vegas magician, that has seen better days, and self-proclaimed vampire slayer (a great combination).

Fright Night brings back the concept of the insidious, inhuman, dispassionate vampire, not the house-trained and anthropomorphised variety that has spread over the world in the dark romance genre (Twilight, Vampire Diaries, True Blood), nor the zombie-like variety of Blade or 30 Days of Night; Fright Night's vampire is of the hair-standing-up-on-the-back-of-your-neck kind, a harking back to the prince of darkness himself – Dracula.

There will be few who won’t enjoy what is said to be "one of the biggest horrors of the year".

Timothy Green