Tom Holland came up with the premise of Fright Night when he was writing the script for Cloak & Dagger, itself a remake of the 1949 thriller The Window. Holland's Fright Night script hit similar Hitchcock-esque plot beats as Cloak & Dagger, but with a more humorous bent and a touch of self-indulgence by his own admission. 'Wouldn't it be wonderful if a horror movie fan - that's me! - became convinced that his next door neighbour was a vampire? (...) If I was that kid - which it's a wish fulfilment story - what would I do? Who would I go to for help?'
There was a major problem with the premise; the vampire genre was more or less dead. The 1970s had seen a rash of films - Dracula in the Provinces, Love at First Bite and, ahem, Vampire Hookers - parodying the Universal and Hammer horror films which were, by that point, seen as cheap and dated. In 1985, vampires were just a bit of a joke.Holland knew this, stating in an interview. 'I have a great deal of affection for the vampire myth. 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 contemporarized it, and gave it validity in today's climate.'
Holland echoed these feelings in a later interview with Starburst, pinpointing the exact film that he felt finished off the genre. 'It happened with Love at First Bite with George Hamilton as Dracula. It absolutely finished off the vampire genre, until 1985 when Fright Night came out, which resuscitated it. When I made Fright Night nobody was making vampire films any more because they had become objects of derision. They were farce.'
Despite his wishes to modernize the vampire, Holland was firm that Fright Night would still keep a pulpy tone, singling out Tony Scott's The Hunger - one of the few serious vampire films made after the 1960s - as an example of what he didn't want to make.
'I love vampires. And I have a lot of affection for the old, sometimes corny, vampire movies and all the Hammer horror films. I hated The Hunger because it seemed to be ashamed of the genre and never even mentioned the word 'vampire' once. I think that if you're going to do it, do it out of affection. So when I decied to do a vampire movie myslf, I wanted to play by all the conventions to be fair to my audience.'Much like how Joe Dante and John Landis had revitalized the moribund werewolf genre with The Howling and An American Werewolf in London, Holland knew that to do vampires justice in the modern day, he needed the best in special effects.
Holland himself said in an interview 'This is a state of the art special effects film. In terms of prosthetics, makeup, optical effects and even the (effects cinematography). The best that was available in terms of today's technology, to make the effects work, are involved in this film.'Fright Night's effects were handled by Richard Edlund's Boss Film Studios. Edlund explained why he took a chance on Holland's film. 'We happen to have a very good relationship with Columbia, because we did Ghostbusters for them. (...) I want us to be able to service shows that don't necessarily have blockbusters-level effects. I want to be able to do smaller shows; that helps us in terms of keeping our talented staff employed. A flow of smaller pictures helps us to keep a comfortably large staff, which has benefits for both small and large pictures'.
Edlund also said in Cinefex, 'It looked like a good script and seemed to us a very interesting experiment. How could we do a picture that wouldn't work unless the special effects worked, without an enormous special effects budget? Because it was such a small project, we had to scale back to a skeletal crew, where our main talent lies, and it proved very educational for us.'Many members of Boss Films' Fright Night team had worked on Ghostbusters, in particular Randall William Cook and Steve Johnson. Edlund praised Cook and Johnson in an interview with Fangoria, 'They're (Steve Johnson and Randy Cook) working out very well in the rubber department here. Randy Cook is a great stopmotion animator, and theyre's probably three or four guys in th world who are any good at it, but he's also a great sculptor; Steve Johnson - another outrageously talented guy - is a very advanced sculptor, and he also has an organizational ability, which you have to have in order to run a department like that.'
The Boss Film Studios team included, past Johnson and Cook, Rick Stratton, Steve Neill, Ken Diaz, Mark Bryan Wilson and Bill Sturgeon, among many others. According to Stratton, Holland was very involved with the Boss Films team. '(Holland) would ask everyone in the art 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 he really respected the opinion of a lot of the different craftsmen who were working on his movie.'The first, and most simple stages of the vampire look were achieved with contact lenses and fangs, much like Hammer's Dracula films or Tobe Hooper's Salem's Lot. Steve Johnson designed the paintjob on the contacts, explaining in Cinefex;
'For me, the eyes were the most interesting aspect of the makeup. But they were the biggest problem we faced in the beginning because Tom Holland really wanted them to glow. At first he wanted the roto(scoping) department (of Boss Film) to animate a glow onto the eyes, but budgetary and time problems - as well as the impracticality of artists trying to line up with a constantly moving head - made that infeasible.
So we decided to go with contact lenses, and I tried especially hard to make them look effect. I started with plastic shells obtainted from Dr. Morton Greenspoon, who offered some suggestions and helpful tips, but we ended up doing the work ourselves. I painted the shells with fluorescent paint to make them as bright as possible, although we didn't shoot them with black light because of the obvious lighting problems. Then I laminated the lenses with layers of coloured glitter, which I don't think had been done before. On top of that, I applied iridescent powders. So the vampire's eyes really kick alive.
After the colors were built up and sealed in with methyl methacrylate, I painted just a little bit of delineation around the iris. They looked kind of funny at first - these brightly colored, glittery things - but when the actor wore them, they looked like natural striations. And there were some shots where the eyes actually looked as if they'd been roto-animated.'
Several versions of the lenses were made, including a set of 'blinded' contacts for Jonathan Stark to wear as the wounded Billy. As usual for contact lenses made for films, the Fright Night contacts were horrible to wear. Ken Diaz remembered 'Now (in the 2010s) we have full scleral lenses that are soft and can be worn for several hours. Back then, you were limited to twenty minutes, or half an hour at the most, before they got unbearable for the actor.'
Stark's recollection of the contacts was more vivid. 'You know what it feels like when someone throws a handful of sand in your eyes? For an hour? That's what it feels like!'
However, it was Amanda Bearse, as the vampire Amy, who had the worst experience with the contact lenses. 'I'm in this pair of lenses and they go into my eyes, and I'm just standing there going 'Oh this is bad! I'm not one to squeak the wheel but this really doesn't feel right!' I finally had to say '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 lenses! They were scratching my eyes!'
Johnson also came up with the vampire fangs, and explained the design process in Cinefex. 'I didn't want to go with just the standard vampire canine fangs, although for the first stage that's pretty much what they are. For the second stage, however, the teeth start changing subtly, and by the third stage they're much more dramatic. I had looked at photographs of bats and noticed that they have a lot of gum showing between the canines and their incisors.
So we left this vast expanse of gum on the uppets and made real tiny teeth in the front like a bat's, using full dental plates. We made the lower canines in front of the upper canines, which is sort of a switch - upside-down from the way most animals are. It was a different way of doing vampire teeth, but they look pretty ferocious.'Chris Sarandon underwent several stages of prosthetic makeup as suburban vampire Jerry Dandridge. Ken Diaz described the makeups. 'We did three stages of the vampire transformation. The early stages were a brow piece. I tried to create a three-dimensional paintjob that could blend in with the later stages of the transformation.
While Ken Diaz did the first stage Jerry makeup's paintjob, the brow piece was sculpted by Steve Neill, and complemented by Johnson's fangs, finger extensions and contact lenses.
Diaz later described the Jerry second stage makeup. 'The second stage was more evolved with a piece that came down (to Sarandon's cheeks) with lines that went down into the face. I kinda drew that with the paintjob in the earlier (makeup stages) to tie that in.'
While the earlier Jerry makeup stages were handled by Ken Diaz and Steve Neill, it was Randall Cook who realized the final makeup. Neill remembered how eager Cook was. 'I remember Randy Cook sitting on the other side of the table, cos (Holland's) talking about how he wants Chris (Sarandon) to have multiple stages of the makeup, and Randy's looking at me and mouthing at me, 'I want to do the final stage! Let me do the final stage!'
Cook explained how he came up with the final Jerry makeup design. 'I based its design on one of my favorite creature makeups - John Barrymore's Mr. Hyde, which featured an extended skull, scraggly hair and long claw-like fingers. The sloping-back forehead, however - which worked so well for Barrymore - didn't work at all for Chris. He has this wonderful, noble cranium that Barrymore didn't have, which was interesting, as it gave the makeup an entirely differentl look. In fact, Chris' high forehead almost worked at odds with the design.'
The third stage makeup design was altered slightly after Jerry is burnt by sunlight, with a more sickly paintjob, and a burn makeup. Diaz explained about the burn makeup, 'That was done with a liquid vinyl application on top of the foam latex prosthetic.'
All the various makeup applications was not enjoyable for Sarandon, who found himself so bored that he needed to find some way to keep himself busy!Sarandon described the experience years later, 'From 5:30 in the morning until approximately 1:30 to 2:30 in the afternoon, you're in the chair. Never been through anything like it in my life. The tedium! As you can imagine, sitting in a chair for eight hours! You can get up and 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 (job), I said you gotta give me something to do or otherwise I'm gonna go crazy! (...) I would help do some of the latex blending, and hey would let me stipple the hands, and make up the hands so that I could pass a couple of these eight hours!
From 4 AM to noon with makeup, and then I'd go out and we'd work for 8 hours, and then I'd come back, get the makeup off in half an hour or 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!'
'Since the plan at the time was to have the vampire wearing the extensions throughout the film, Randy Cook started by sculpting very small ones - something like a quarter of an inch out. But after discussing the matter with Tom, we realized that if we were going to to go to all of the trouble of applying fingers on this guy every day, we might as well make sure the audience noticed. So we ended up making them almost an inch longer.
Basically, we took casts of the actor's straight fingers and repositioned the joints so it wouldn't look as if the last digit just happened to be unusually long. For the joint closest to the fingernail, we cut the foam out, pinched it back and glued it so that it looked as if it were bent. That way, when the real joints bent, the finger followed the natural curve. If they were scheduled to shoot scenes where it was going to be obvious that Dandridge was moving his hands a lot, Ken Diaz applied the bent fingers. Otherwise, he put on simple straight extensions.'Sarandon also helped with the finger extensions to help alievate the boredom of being in the makeup chair! Stratton explained, 'He actually started helping us by putting the finger extensions on his own hands, or at least the ones that he could start glueing down while Ken (Diaz) and I were working on his face.'
There was two main stages to Amanda Bearce's makeups as the vampire Amy. Johnson explained how the first, more traditionally 'sexy' vampire look was achieved.
'Tom Holland wanted Amy to be very sexy and punkish so I made lenses for her as I had done for Dandridge. Steve Neill devised her growing teeth. Ken Diaz kept doing her (beauty) makeup more and more stylized, and we fitted her with wigs made by Ziggy. I also figured that to make her really seductive, she'd need a little breast enhancement - so I sculpted my dream breasts for her.'
The second stage makeup on Bearce - the iconic 'shark mouth' - was a last minute addition on Holland's part, as the original draft of the Amy attack sequence merely had her lunging at Charley's throat, still as a 'sexy' vampire. Holland knew the scene needed more of a punch. 'I realized that if she turned around, and she had the mouth from hell, that it would be a huge scream! (...) If you're into oral sex, that's your nightmare come alive!'
The shark mouth was made by Randall Cook, and without much time or money! Cook recounted, 'Late into the game, Tom Holland came over and was being extra friendly. 'I really need something special, and Richard (Edlund) won't go for it. Do you think, just as a favor to me, that you could sculpt a 'shark mouth'? We can't pay for it, could you do it for free? Also, it shoots on Tuesday' 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!' 'Cook explained in detail to Cinefex, 'The mouth was designed as a shock-cut device and, as such, worked fine. The idea behind it, I suppose, was not unlike George Miller's method for punching up a reaction shot by doing a quick cut of bulging eyeballs as he did in Mad Max and Twilight Zone: The Movie. It was a very quick piece done over a casting of Amanda's face wherein I made some appliance that fit over that. It was completed, basically, in about two days. Had I known that it was going to occupy as much screen time as it would up doing, I would have detailed it a little more carefully.'
It was Ken Diaz who handled the application and painting of the mask, as well as adding some makeup touches of his own. 'I put it on (Bearce) and blended it in (with her face), and painted on some very extreme, deep-set eyeliner, something that I felt would jump out!'
The mask, combined with the uncomfortable eye contacts, meant that Amanda Bearce did not have an easy time during filming. Rick Stratton remembered one particularly unpleasant incident. 'It was very hot and claustrophobic, and there was all these low beams (on the set), so she kept hitting her head on the beams! And after a bunch of takes of this, I realized she was crying. She had hit her head really bad (on the beams).Everyone on the set was laughing, 'Ain't this cool?' because it looked like she was laughing (in the mask), but I knew she was actually crying. At this point I had enough, I reached in and pulled the teeth, ripping the mask, saying 'Okay I think we're done here' cos I just was pissed off. And then someone tapped me on the shoulder and went 'Uh hey Rick, we're not done shooting this sequence yet'. I realized I'd made a bonehead move!'
Randall Cook was surprised to find out that his mask, made on the quick for no money, ended up as one of the film's most iconic images. 'When the movie was released, I was told 'Have you seen the poster?' I thought it would be the Jerry Dandridge makeup as that was pretty good, and he's the lead vampire. But no they said, it was Amanda Bearse's shark mouth! I was like 'Oh fuck you! They're not gonna put *that* on the poster!' And then they showed the poster! They painted it better than we made it, but you know...never trust a director!'
Johnson designed the Evil Ed 'malformed' transformation prosthetic appliance, explaining how he came up with the look. 'I had worked on The Howling with Rob Bottin, went straight on to American Werewolf in London with Rick Baker. While these were very jaw-dropping and groundbreaking effects sequences, it just always bugged me that they were transforming symmetrically? (...) Who's to say, that if you were transforming from a wolf into a boy, or vice versa, that it would be in an even way? I always thought it would be much more interesting if we could get a little Quasimodo on it!'
The makeup design gave the sequence a tragic air, as Johnson explained, 'I did a makeup that was really monstrous on one side and kind of like a sick-looking boy on the other. The idea of the shot was that there would be a profile of him lying on his back, and at first we would see only the wolf side. Then, as he turned his head, we would see the boy side of Evil Ed.'Randall Cook recalled a mishap that occurred when getting the makeup to appear more wet and tearful. 'At one point, Steve (Johnson) says 'We need to wet his eye up a bit, give me the methocel. Methocel is used as a thickener in food products, like donuts and jellies. He pours it in the eye and starts to pour it in (Stephen Geoffries') mouth for good measure.
Poor Stephen is like 'What is this stuff?', we say 'Don't worry, it's what they put in donuts!', and he says 'It doesn't taste like any donut I've eaten!'. I look at the eye he's poured it in, not Stephen's real eye but the prosthetic's glass eye, which is starting to get cloudy. Oh hell! It's not methocel! It's glue!'
'On An American Werewolf in London, Rick Baker and I spent about twelve-and-a-half hours on the longest makeup. For Fright Night, we spent seventeen hours on the wolf get-up. Ken Diaz, Rick Stratton and Jeff Kennemore did an incredible job of painting the body - which was covered with motley yellow, bruise-like discolorations - and it was hours into the body painting before we could even begin to apply the hair and nails.
The whole time Stephen was lying under the stairs, he had on a fiberglass chest plate with a retractable stake in it. He also wore an understructure that went beneath the shoulder padding and was equipped with bladders causing one side of his body to be more puffed up than the other. The whole thing was covered with an appliance that went over the neck and mechanical head. With the body painting and hair application, it was an extremely lengthy process. It's impossible to tell which parts are fake and which parts are real because he's changing asymmetrically. At the beginning of the sequence, he had two fake legs sticking up through the floor, with one real arm and one fake arm. And we worked the head of the suit so that Stephen's head was actually bent down looking at the floor (with eyeholes hidden by fur), with the wolf's head extended out over the top of his own.'The false limbs and cable-controlled animatronic head of the Evil Ed suit were operated from behind the set's fake wall and fake floor. The werewolf's spindly false arm had actually originally been made for the librarian puppet in Ghostbusters a year before.
(Amusingly, Stephen Geoffries' real arm - tucked behind his back - can be briefly glimpsed in the shot where he falls forward from under the staircase!)Geoffries remembered the experience as nothing but an ordeal. 'I really don't even know how I endured that! (...) I think they gave me some kind of pill to sleep in the chair! I was just sitting there with shorts on, with all these guys painting my arms and legs and sticking on wolf hair! It was the most inhumane experience! (...) I remember when getting out of (the wolf suit) for the last time, I ran as fast as I could away from it!'
During the transformation, a brief shot reveals Ed's hand reforming from a wolf paw into a human hand. Johnson explained, 'I made a skeleton dog paw and then built up separate muscles, veins and tendons of a human hand, and then put on a very thin skin 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 from underneath the floor (and dog's paw!), and these cables were also made of meltable gelatin!
So out of frame, we set up these space heaters, ramped the camera speed up, and melted the hell out of it! While we were melting it, when the skin got soupy, we would start pulling the muscles and veins away, to reveal a wolf paw! Then we reversed the footage.'The melting paw shot was also accompanied by a shot of the werewolf's foot reverting to a human shape. Johnson explained in Cinefex how it was a typical 'change-o-part', 'The insert of the foot was pretty standard. Dave Matherly created an extending mechanism inside a foam rubber foot, and Rob Cantrell finished the look with a terrific paint job.'
The Boss Films crew had to work long shifts, which led to some awkward sleeping arrangements as Ken Diaz recounted. 'Shooting day was extremely long for us in the makeup department. There was many times where we only had four hours between shifts. We'd wrap up at about 8 o'clock in the morning and had to be back in 5 o'clock in the morning. Our makeup trailer had a little cubby hole (for props) up on top with a black curtain. And on many nights, I slept in that cubby hole! I slept with a wolf, with a stake through it!'
The contact lenses led to awkward situations for Stark. 'If you look when I'm going up the stairs, one contact's (looking away) and the other's looking straight ahead. That's my actual eye. (At first) I had two contacts in, and I couldn't see! Every time I went up the stairs, I'd trip! After three times, Tom just went, 'Take one out! So you can see!'
Stark remembered a more embarrassing detail with the bloodied stake prop however. 'I have this big stake sticking out of me, and they're ready to shoot and then they call 'Lunch!' and I go 'They're gonna take (the bloody makeup) off, right?' and they go 'Well we put it on, it's a long process, so no!'. So I go in the canteen, I got this stake sticking out of me, and I've got to eat. Try eating when you've got a stake sticking out of you? It's very difficult!'
They said 'You're wrapped', and I said, 'Great! Point me to the nearest shower!'. 'Our plumbing's down!' 'So I've gotta drive him like his?!' So I'm driving along the Santa Monica freeway, just covered in blood and green stuff, and my clothes are a mess!
I look at my gas gauge, and I have to get gas! Fuck! So I go in a gas station, wait for the guy to come out and he looks down (...) I take off and I see him on the phone, probably calling the cops! That stuff always happens when you really don't want it to happen!'
The physical effect of the hands melting was achieved via prosthetic gloves. Mark Bryan Wilson explained, 'I started with taking lifecasts of very small women's hands. The women were about 5ft high, while Jonathan Stark is about 6ft. So I actually built everything on top of a woman's smaller hand. On top of the foam and rubber were tubes that pumped ooze.'
At first, Johnson wanted to eschew the gelatin dummy method as seen in Raiders of the Lost Ark and went with a different approach. According to Randall Cook, 'Steve originally wanted to pump hexane - a liquid solvent - into the rubber, causing it to swell and distort, so Rob Cantrell oversaw that and came up with a really good effect. But it wasn't what Tom wanted. He didn't want the head to bloat and malform; he wanted it to melt.'
The use of solvents when testing the original Billy death effect proved to be risky, as Randall Cook found out. 'I remember when they were testing the Billy disintegration, there were a dozen hoses inside (the puppet) to make it swell up. And there were a dozen people, not highly trained technicians, just kids like the rest of us, pushing these hoses! And one of them pushed too hard, and the hose became disentangled from Billy's rubber face and this big spurt of benzene hit me right in the eye! I had to go to the hospital, I thought I would go blind!'
'It was animated with rods and cables - and with the hand of fearless puppeteer Mark Bryan Wilson, who wound up withstanding some pretty tropical weather as there were a couple of heat guns aimed at him to melt the gelatin, which of course globbed all over him in the process. Bill Neil shot it against a bluescreen at twelve frames a second rather than at a very, very low rate of speed. It just seemed better to make it happen twice as fast rather than six, seven or eight times as fast.'
Being a vampire, Jerry naturally would transform into a bat, though Tom Holland was very particular about avoiding the cliche of just turning into a cuddly pipistrelle!
Holland laid out his aim in Cinefex, 'There's never been a successful bat in any vampire movie I've ever seen. For Fright Night, I wanted to see a bad that had clearly been a man - something with an eight-foot wingspan. I wanted there to be a connection between the appearance of the vampire as a man and as a bat.'It was Randy Cook who was tasked with the vampire bat, from the design and sculpting to the animating of the puppets. Cook explained his process behind the bat's design. 'I thought it would be fun to incorporate various elements of the actor's appearance into the bat sculpture. The only probably was that the bat had to be sculpted before the actor playing Jerry Dandridge was cast, so we didn't know who to make it look like! What saved us was that we did know the vampire was going to become more bestial each time he got angry, so I figured we could probably work backwards. That is, I thought we could design the bat first, and then adapt stages of makeup to an actor that would have various resonances of the bat's appearance.'
Another thing I wanted to do was get a feeling of translucency in the wings. I decided that rather than actually painting the wing detail with pigment - which would cause problems in lighting from behind - we should cause problems in lighting from behind - we should instead build the wings with layers of pigmented rubber. That would, when one was layered upon the other, give the impression of veins and fiber.'
Cook commented on Wilson's work, 'Mark would spray coats of vein-coloured rubber on top of the (wing) rubber, and then it was encased in more rubber. We could have just painted it, as it turned out for all you saw it, the wings are all wrinkling (in motion)!'
Johnson said about the marionette, 'Randy Cook's bat, now that was amazing! It was a huge overhead rig. These bats they used to pull on strings (in older vampire films)? It was ten leagues beyond that. It had pull cables for different parts of the skeleton, and it had also had tension going down, so when you pulled up, you had tension that made it look really muscly.'
Cook explained how camera trickery was also used to make the marionette's 'flying' look more natural. 'With the puppet's seven-foot wingspan, I knew that in order to get a look of power and solidity in th flapping, we had to make the downstroke of the wing fairly rapid - say in eight frames or so. If we were to frame using real time, the only way to get the proper speed would be to totally let loose of the marionette's wires and let them drop, which would sacrifice all the control. I figured we could get optimum control by doing the pantomime in slow motion and shooting at about two frames per second - which is what we did.'
'Poor Roddy McDowall had the biggest challenge of all, though. After maneuvering the bat for so long, I was exhausted - and so all he was fighting with was this incredibly weak thing, trying to make it look as if he were in peril'. The puppeteering was made more awkward with the fact that Cook had to puppeteer the bat puppet with his face in McDowall's crotch!
McDowall may have been acting a little too well, adding to Cook's frustration. 'We're doing the bat on the set, a very fine structure that was fibreglass mostly. Roddy grabs a bone and puts it in the bat's mouth to keep the bat from biting him and the (puppet's) goddamn head broke!'Cook earned another injury thanks to the chemicals used for when the bat starts to smoulder in sunlight. 'I was down there, lying in Roddy McDowall's lap, with the A&B smoke on it splashing around, and it gets on my neck! It's part acid and base, hence 'A & B', and it got on my neck! You can still see the scar! We were dealing with stupid chemicals in a rather stupid way.'
The destructible Jerry puppet was made to resemble the third stage Jerry makeup. Randy Cook explained, 'We made the face out of flash paper, which is something that burns very well! Sometimes it's the crazy ideas that lead you into the most interesting solutions.'
Johnson explained further in a later interview, 'It led me to come up with liquid nitroglycerin that could be pumped through brass tubing into the foam rubber. The way that works is, you pump nitric acid in, the animatronic puppet gets soaked with that and then you have other brass tubes that you pump a little sulfuric acid in.
The moment the sulfuric acid hits the rubber puppet, which has already been soaked in nitric acid, it becomes nitroglycerin!
Johnson would find out, like many other members of the crew, the dangers of playing around with industrial chemicals. He explained in the same interview;There's a chemical you can neutralize the acid with, which I'm pouring on the puppet so that we can throat it away safely, and not thinking a thing until I'm driving home and me feet started to tingle. I got home, looked down at my tennis shoes and they were literally burned off my feet! Not from the acid, but from the neutralizing agent that was just as strong. In the excitement of having the effect work, I had paid no attention to the fact that my feet were literally melting off! I couldn't walk for a couple of weeks'.
The Jerry skeleton was yet another example of props from Ghostbusters being reused, as Bruno said in the same quote, 'To make the skeleton, Richard (Edlund) asked Columbia to return the molds for the librarian ghost from Ghostbusters. It was her skull that punches through Dandridge's face and, oddly enough, it really resembled our bat.'
The Jerry Dandridge puppet sequences were shot in an outdoors set, as it was too dangerous to use the toxic chemicals in a closed building. Stratton said about shooting the finale, 'These were literally the last days of filming so we blew up and burned up as much stuff as we could until there was nothing to burn anymore, and we were done!'
Boss Film had approached the project as seriously as they could, despite the lower budget. John Bruno said in Cinefex, 'We also took the attitude that just because the film had economic limitations, it didn't have to be approached as a 'B' picture. And it might easily have become one without the backing Columbia gave Tom in terms of production design, photography and special effects. Everyone took the position that only the best work would be acceptable.'
Richard Edlund himself was proud of Boss Film's work on Fright Night. 'Columbia really got their money's worth from us on this film. My feeling with visual effects is that they work best when they're put in exactly the right place and not dwelt upon. You get more for your money if you design the show properly.'Sources:
- Cinefex #25 (February 1986), 'Fright Night' by Jennifer Benidt and Janine Pourrory
- Fangoria #48 'Richard Edlund: A Conversation with the Boss of Boss'
- You're So Cool, Brewster: The Story of Fright Night (2016)
- Starburst 'Interview: Tom Holland, Director of FRIGHT NIGHT'
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