80s Vampire Classics

8/6/2020

Listen Now:

Fright Night and The Lost Boys: two iconic – and very different – 80’s takes on the vampire tale. On this special McQuaid Arcade Feature Presentation, it’s all the damn vampires…well, maybe not ALL of them. But definitely the coolest ones.

Bonus Stage!

Welcome to this episode’s Bonus Stage, where you can see and learn more about some of the stuff we talked about.

Fun fact:

Tom Holland, writer/director of Fright Night, also wrote another one of our old school favorites, Cloak and Dagger:

Peter Vincent’s Necklace

Here’s a closeup look at the necklace Bigs is almost certainly assembling a copy of for himself as we speak.

Eternal Bromance

Find someone who makes you feel the way Jerry feels when he’s hugging Billy.

Who You Gonna Call…

…when you need a terrifying vampire skeleton made? The amazing VFX team that made this thing, that’s who. It’s so perfect for Fright Night that it’s hard to believe it was a repurposed Ghostbusters reject!

Tom Holland hanging out with the prop in a 2011 Fright Night retrospective:

For comparison: this is what they ended up going with for the Librarian ghost in Ghostbusters. Slightly less scary, sure, but this thing was still nightmare fuel for lil’ Bigs and Barney.

More like SUCKuels, am I right?

Fright Night: “I’ve got the worst sequel ever.”

The Lost Boys: “Hold my beer.*”

*or whatever the vampire equivalent of beer is. Maybe it is beer. I mean why not? The vampires in The Lost Boys eat Chinese food, and Jerry spends most of Fright Night eating fruit.

Speaking of…

Jerry eating fruit through the whole movie was actually Chris Sarandon’s idea:

From a Gizmodo interview:

“Jerry ate all kinds of fruit because it was just sort of something I discovered by searching it — that most bats are not blood-sucking, but they’re fruit bats. And I thought well maybe somewhere in Jerry’s genealogy, there’s fruit bat in him, so that’s why I did it.”

Neat, right?