Fright Night (2011)

Craig Gillespie's 2011 Fright Night takes Tom Holland's 1985 cult item and relocates it to a Las Vegas suburb, where a teenager named Charley Brewster (Anton Yelchin) grows suspicious of the handsome neighbor (Colin Farrell) who never seems to eat, never seems to sleep, and keeps a basement full of troubling architecture. Marti Noxon's screenplay moves the pieces efficiently. A disgraced magician (David Tennant) is drafted as a vampire expert. A girlfriend (Imogen Poots) is imperiled. A house burns. The film knows precisely what it is, which is a brisk, well-lit creature feature that arrives, snarls, and departs.

There is no argument buried in any of this. The cast is uniformly pale and the suburbs are the suburbs, populated by people who exist to be drained and thereby raise the stakes. Nobody pauses to explain what the monster represents. Nobody delivers a monologue about the housing market or the cruelty of the young. The film is content to be a remake and nothing more, and it carries that modest ambition with a certain professionalism. Colin Farrell is having a good time. Toni Collette, as the mother, is asked to be worried and manages it.

For those of us who catalogue these matters, Fright Night is a clarifying specimen. It is a genre exercise from an era that still permitted genre exercises. It does not lecture, does not correct the record, does not ask us to examine our assumptions about anything beyond the practical question of whether a vampire can be killed with a signpost and a flame-retardant suit. It simply wants to entertain, and it largely does. A relic, then, and a revealing one.