Monsters On Screen: Fright Night (1985)

Tom Holland fully intended his love letter to the vampire genre to be 'a state of the art special effects film, in terms of prosthetics, makeup, optical effects (...) the best that was available in terms of today's technology to make the effects work are involved in this film'.

Handling the special effects was Richard Edlund's Boss Film Studios; among the team were Randall William Cook, Steve Johnson, Ken Diaz, Mark Bryan Wilson, Rick Stratton and Steve Neill. Holland worked closely with Edlund's team. According to Stratton, Holland asked the various artists '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?'.

Many of the effects artists were eager to do their best work; Randall William Cook and Steve Johnson in particular squabbled over who could do more of the effects-heavy segments. Steve Neill also was privy to this quarrelling; he recalled that Holland wished him to be the lead makeup artist for the film; '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!'.

The vampire makeups in the film were intended to be more grotesque than any vampire makeups previously seen on the screen. Three stages of makeup transformation were made for Chris Sarandon. The first stage was merely fangs, contacts and finger extensions, but the second stage consisted of a brow piece, eye contacts, finger extensions and a three-dimensional paintjob realized by Ken Diaz. A similar makeup was applied on Stephen Geoffreys as the vampiric Evil Ed, the most notable difference being the crucifix scar appliance.

The third stage makeup for Sarandon was a fully covering foam appliance with pronounced cheekbones and the same paintjob as the earlier stage, and worn with a bald cap of ratty hair. As per Cook's earlier wishes, he got to do the final grotesque look of Jerry's facial transformation, when Jerry has half his face burned.

Sarandon did not enjoy his time in the makeup chair, getting restless and stressed in the eight hours it took to applye the prosthetics; eventually Sarandon requested that he be allowed to at least do something, and was allowed to do some of the latex blending and stick the finger extensions to his own to pass the time. A much more painful experience came in the form of the custom painted contact lenses Steve Johnson had designed. These contact lenses, that Sarandon, Stephen Geoffries and Amanda Bearse wore in their transformed vampiric states, did not have their paintjobs sanded down, causing them to scratch each of the performer's eyes during each take, causing severe eye pain.

For the latter stages of Amy's vampire transformation, Holland wanted a very last shock to the audience; he decided that Amy would now have 'the mouth from hell'. This was realized at the last second by Holland asking Randy Cook very nicely to sculpt a 'shark mouth' as quick as he could, and for free; Holland assured Cook that it would only be shot in a very quick cut. Cook sculpted a fairly static latex mask worn over Amanda Bearse's face. To the embarassment of Cook and others on the effects team, Holland loved the mask so much that it appeared in many more shots in the finale, and ended up becoming the most iconic image of the film!

Holland wanted a new spin on the classic 'vampire bat' motif, and he stated his reasoning in a 1985 interview with Cinefex (Magazine #25), 'There's never been a successful bat in any vampire movie I've seen (...) for Fright Night I wanted there to be a connection between the vampire as a man and as a bat.' As such, the bat form adopted by the vampire Jerry Dandridge would not just be a 'Universal (Studios) bat-on-the-line', but an uncanny demonic fusion between human and bat. Jerry's bat form was designed by Randy Cook and realized as a marionette for the sequences where it's flying; it was put in front of a blue-screen and puppeteered from above in order to make the wings flap.

The wings actually 'flew' very slowly in order to not damage the puppet, and the footage was sped up in post-production to make it seem like they were rapidly beating. To make the rubber wings appear like a fleshy membrane with veins, as well as create matching wing patterns for the different bat puppets, Mark Wilson did a pen and ink pattern on paper that was brass-etched into a stencil. According to Randy Cook, 'Mark would spray coats of vein-coloured rubber on top of the rubber, and then it was encased in more rubber'.

For the sequences where Jerry-Bat claws at Roddy McDowall, a hand puppet was designed and operated by Randall William Cook; this puppet proved to be a lot of trouble to operate and film; according to interviews with Fangoria (issues #47 and #49, both from 1985), Cook had built the mechanism too tight. This combined with the general woes of puppetry meant that filming the sequences tired Cook out, so McDowall would have to overact to pretend the limply moving puppet was attacking him. To keep out of the shot, Cook had to bury his head in McDowall's crotch!

Further complications arised when realizing the effect of Jerry-Bat burning in the sunlight; this was achieved with the A&B Smoke being splashed on the puppet; some of the liquid ended up on Cook's neck, and scarred him; he still has the burn scar on his neck to this day. 'We were dealing with stupid chemicals, in a rather stupid way', Cook later mused, 'but most of us lived!'.

(As an aside, Tom Holland himself has possession of the Jerry-Bat hand puppet.)

The very last variant of the Jerry-Bat was the briefly seen skeletal form as he's burning alive from being exposed to sunlight; the intention was to show that Jerry was desperately trying to transform back into a bat and escape his demise. The skeletal form was actually a repurposing of the molds made for the original design of the librarian ghost in Ghostbusters a year earlier, which Edlund's team had worked on. As the original inhuman ghost design had been rejected, the molds may as well be put to use.

For Evil Ed's transformation back from wolf to human, Johnson wished to rectify an aspect of American Werewolf in London and The Howling's transformations that bugged him, namely how they felt 'symmetrical'. 'Who's to say if you're transforming from a wolf to a boy (...) it would happen in an even way? I thought it would be much more interesting if we could get a little Quasimodo on it'. The later stages were realized as lumpy uneven prosthetics applied on Stephen Geoffreys' face; Johnson later did similar prosthetics on Bad Moon, albeit obscured by digital effects.

For the transformation's early stages, Geoffreys endured nearly 18 hours in the makeup chair as prosthetics were applied to his whole body; it was so lengthy that he was given sleeping pills to pass the time. The werewolf head was worn as a helmet, with Geoffreys only able to see out of holes in the neck appliance; the head itself was fitted with cable-operated animatronics that allowed it to blink, grimace and open its jaws. Geoffreys had to sit with his back on the set's wall so that a puppeteer behind it could operate the rod-puppeted fake spindly arm, as well as another puppeteer underneath the set's floor operating the rod-puppet wolf legs.