A Film Canon

By the late 80s and early 90s, suburban horror was starting to migrate into something more like suburban grotesque, and Fright Light is perhaps the most satisfying take on this movement, which also included The 'Burbs and The People Under The Stairs, just because it understands it as a technological movement, a shift in horror media. In essence, Tom Holland's innovation is fusing vampire horror with suburban horror - and not just any vampire horror, but the Hammer horror of the 1950s and 1960s, which intrudes upon Charley Brewster's (William Ragsdale) consciousness by way of the curated television horror programs that form his cinematic canon. When a potentially vampiric couple move in next door, Charley finds himself torn between television and window - or, rather, finds television and window fused into the voyeuristic pleasure that distracts him from his girlfriend, and contributes to the film's queering of fandom, which not only ensures that the vampiric couple are also a homosexual couple, but that when Charley's friend, Evil Ed (Stephen Geoffreys), becomes vampiric, it's presented as a disco-driven coming-out narrative, a surrogate for whatever process drove Geoffreys into gay porn shortly after the film was released, and kept him there for some twenty years. It's only a matter of time before the dominant vampire, Jerry (Chris Sarandon), looks back through, and then enters, Charley's window, collapsing the televisual-windowed threshold, as well as rephrasing suburban horror's fixation with inviting the right kind of people into your home. It's a testament to Holland's vision, then, that he manages to poise the majority of the film on this threshold, effectively a threshold between suspense and spectacle, between horror and grotesque, without any diminution of atmosphere or interest - and it's largely because he understands the late-night horror curator as the embodiment of this threshold. As a result, actor-turned-curator-turned-possible-vampire Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowell) plays a critical role, while the film ultimately plays as a tribute to late night TV curators, and their odd, atonal position at the intersection of cinematic, televisual and VHS technologies; a media trigonometry, or substitute for the failed triangulation that sets the narrative in play.