The Fright Night script was born out of director and writer Tom Holland’s enthusiasm for the vampire genre of old. “I love vampires,” he said, “and I have a lot of affection for the old, sometimes corny, vampire movies and all the Hammer horror films. […] I think that if you’re going to do [a genre film], do it out of affection. So, when I decided to do a vampire movie myself, I wanted to play by all the conventions to be fair to my audience.” The film would thus be firmly anchored to genre roots while making a contemporary update — and that came with new special effects technologies to portray the more fantastic elements of the script, beyond the limits of the classic pictures.

On the special and visual effects front, the production team turned to Richard Edlund’s Boss Film Studios, with whom Columbia Pictures had already collaborated on Ghostbusters. Compared to the special effects company’s previous efforts, Fright Night had a tighter budget, a challenge that Edlund gladly accepted. He said: “following the large-scale productions of Ghostbusters and 2010, this seemed like the perfect project for us. We had our creature shop all set up and, although there were projects in negotiations, we didn’t have any other work at the time. Also, it afforded us the opportunity to show we could do a small project. As opposed to doing a $5 to $8 million budget, we were dealing with somewhat less than $1 million, so it was a good chance to show our flexibility.” He also added: “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.”

Initial effects storyboards by Holland and production designer John DeCuir Jr. were passed over to Boss Film art director John Bruno and production illustrator Brent Boates for revisions, with the creature department led by Randall William Cook and Steve Johnson. The small budget was a primary concern when designing the effects shots, and many of them had to be streamlined. Bruno related: “Tom and John DeCuir came up with some very good and elaborate ideas for the effects sequences which, because of the film’s small budget, had to be reworked and simplified somewhat. Working with the group here, Brent and I designed each shot in the most direct, dramatic and economical way possible. The most challenging aspect of the project was that, unlike films with really big budgets, we tried to do everything as realistically as possible. We attempted to do the effects in-camera, rather than as opticals. 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.”

Over the course of the film, Jerry Dandridge turns two other characters into Vampires, and all of the make-ups included vampiric contact lenses and dentures devised by Johnson. Ken Diaz worked on the application of the make-ups, aided by Rick Stratton and John Goodwin, as well as Cook and Johnson themselves.

About the Vampire eyes, Johnson related: “for me, the eyes were the most interesting aspect of the make-up, 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 department 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 effective.”

The lenses began as outsourced plastic domes. “I started with plastic shells obtained from Dr. Morton Greenspoon,” Johnson continues, “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 colours 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 coloured, glittery things — but when the actor wore them, they looked like natural striations. And there were some shots were the eyes looked as if they’d been roto-animated.”

Evil Ed becomes Dandridge’s Vampire henchman. The Ed make-up, as mentioned, included contact lenses and two stages of dentures — with the second stage featuring dilated gum space between the central incisors and the lateral incisors, which have become fangs like the following teeth. For the scene where a cross burns Ed’s forehead, a special appliance was devised with tubes blowing cigarette smoke out of the wound, as well as secreted elvacite that created the illusion of seared flesh adhering to the cross as it is pulled away.

Evil Ed’s death was complex and involved various techniques. Edlund and Bruno designed the sequence taking advantage of darkness and quick cuts and glimpses, reducing the originally intended amount of light in order to better conceal certain elements. This involved a swinging chandelier, which the Wolf Ed crashes into before falling on the floor. “Having the chandelier swing really improved the sequence 1.000%,” said visual effects cinematographer Bill Neil. “If that light had not been swinging and the figure not going in and out of shadow, we could not have held on certain shots as long and it would not have played nearly as well. The fact that you were seeing just brief glimpses of that material made it work out well.”

The Vampire first transforms offscreen into a Wolf, portrayed by real trained wolves, with the flashing red eyes provided by rotoscope supervisor Annick Therrien. The Wolf Ed is stabbed, crashes into the chandelier, falls on the floor and then drags itself away, hiding underneath the stairwell. These actions were performed by a cable- and wire-operated Wolf dummy, cast in foam rubber from taxidermy forms and covered in real wolf skin by a taxidermist.

Peter Vincent descends the stairs and witnesses Ed’s prolonged, painful transformation back into a human form. Johnson’s baseline idea, deviating from previous similar efforts for a touch of innovation, was that the change should occur asymmetrically. He related: “ever since American Werewolf, I have been interested in trying something different from the typical transformation heads that just stretch out symmetrically, so I approached Tom Holland with the idea of an asymmetrical transformation where the body parts did not change evenly or at the same rates of speed. Besides the fact that I thought it would be more naturalistic and something that hadn’t been seen before, Tom was really going for empathy for the character. He wasn’t supposed to be a snarling slobbering monster that people would not feel sorry for. So, it kind of works along the principle Charles Laughton or any of the actors playing the Hunchback of Notre Dame followed — that is, if he’s deformed and whimpering, you’re going to feel a lot more sorry for him.”

Working on concept sculptures for the effect, Johnson especially focused on one with marked asymmetry, somewhat neglecting other variations. “When I was initially sculpting designs to show [Holland], I worked really hard on that one particular concept and spent just a little time on the other two,” he said. “They weren’t bad, but they were basically just roughed-in clay sketches of very standard-looking werewolves. Well, he really liked the one I preferred, but later admitted to John Bruno: ‘I like the asymmetrical werewolf, but I’m a little worried about Steve. The other sculptures were good, but they weren’t great. Do you think this guy’s going to be okay?’ Rather than being offended, I was relieved — at that point it became clear that he knew the difference between good and bad.”

The transformation begins with insert shots of Ed’s morphing limbs. The foot shortening was achieved with a relatively simple extending mechanism inside a foam rubber foot, devised by David Matherly and painted by Rob Cantrell, and captured in reverse photography. The hand was a meltable model, mostly concocted by Craig Caton, and also shot in reverse. Johnson explained: “we did a close-up of a hand that we made out of rubber, removable, pull-away tendons and bones and muscles layers, and a meltable gelatin skin on the outside. We melted this outer skin and, as it started getting soupy, we pulled everything away and underneath we had a wolf paw. We then reversed the film so that it started out as a paw which then suddenly grows all the anatomically correct parts of a boy’s hand.” The shots were made morechallenging by the swinging chandelier light, but Cook — with experience provided by his stop-motion work — helped with the timing of the set-ups.

The rest of the sequence involved complex make-up applications on Stephen Geoffreys, with some shots filmed in first unit, and the most part in post-production. The first transitional stage required around 17 hours to be completed, breaking previous records. Johnson recalled: “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.”

Geoffreys wore a fiberglass chest plate with a retractable stake on it, as well as an understructure beneath the shoulder padding, equipped with bladders, “causing one side of his body to be more puffed up than the other,” said Johnson. “The whole thing was covered with an appliance that went over the neck, and a mechanical head. With the body painting and hair application, it was an extremely lengthy process.” The cable-controlled head was mounted on top of Geoffreys’ head, forcing him to look down for most of the shots. The look was completed by a prosthetic left arm and pair of legs, sculpted in a withered, changing form, with the actor’s real arm behind his back and his legs concealed within the elevated floor.

Ed reaches for Peter Vincent, falls on the floor and regresses further. In one shot, a rod-puppeteered insert arm falls along the stake, then replaced by Geoffreys’ own arm with prosthetic nails and body paint, emerging from the bottom of the frame. A side shot of Ed on laying on the floor follows; the make-up employed therein had deformed wolf-like features on the right side, with the other mostly leaving Geoffreys’ face exposed. “[It] was really monstrous on one side and kind of like a sickly-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.” The effect was, again, aided by the swinging chandelier, which provided an alternation of light and shadow. The transformation concludes with Ed’s human form finally collapsing and the cross mark disappearing from his forehead — a simple fade effect.

While the Vampire make-up on Amy is mostly confined to dentures and contact lenses (as well as differently styled hair and breast augmentations) for much of the film, the final stage featured a monstrous, oversized mouth ringed about with teeth and fangs. The application was devised by Cook, who explained: “it was a very quick piece done over a casting of Amanda [Bearse]’s face wherein I made some teeth that fit on top of her face and then made a foam rubber appliance that fit over that. It was completed, basically, in about two days.”

The effect was originally intended for brief cuts only; the director, however, ended up shooting and editing in more than planned. “The mouth was designed as a shock-cut device,” said Cook, “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. I had expected to see it edited with the same judicious treatment, but instead it was used in four or five cuts and the poster. Perhaps I’m a little tough on the appliance because I was in on its rather slapdash inception and execution, but Tom didn’t seem to think it was as bad as I did, and so he decided to get a little more mileage out of it.” He also added: “had I known that it was going to occupy as much screen time as it wound up doing, I would have detailed it a little more carefully.”

The lead Vampire of the film is Jerry Dandridge, who undergoes bodily transformations that reflect his mood in a given moment. There were three stages of make-up, sculpted by Steve Neill and Rick Stratton. “The first, or transitional stage was comprised of a brow piece and a nose tip sculpted by Steve Neill,” Cook said. “The rest of the effect was done with paint.”

Johnson explained the motivation behind the denture designs: “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 incisors. So, we left this vast expanse of gum on the uppers and made real tiny teeth in the front like a bat’s, using full dental plates.”

The long, clawed fingers for all stages were based on the classic Nosferatu look. Johnson said: “originally, Tom wanted to concentrate only on his ‘killing’ hand, which I thought was an interesting idea — to exaggerate the right hand he used in wiping out his victims; but then he decided halfway through that it might look kind of absurd if the Vampire had one long hand and one small hand, so we decided to embellish both. 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 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.”

Casts of Sarandon’s hands had their joints repositioned “so it wouldn’t look as if the last digit just happened to be unusually long,” Johnson continues. “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.”

In designing the more monstrous second stage, Cook was inspired by the transformation in the 1920 film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He explained: “as far as the face was concerned, I based its design on one of my favourite creature make-ups — 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 make-up an entirely different look. In fact, Chris’ high forehead almost worked at odds with the design.”

The second and third stage — in essence the second stage with a burned look on the left side — required circa eight hours to apply. Elements of the make-up included a paper-thin mask, a bald cap with a hair fringe cut into form by hairdresser Marina Pedraza, a nose appliance, brow appliances and ear appliances.

Early on in the film, Dandridge is stabbed in the hand with a pencil — which goes through and emerges on the other side — and pulls it off in pain, leaving a scorched wound. For this effect, Johnson devised a foam latex appliance that covered Sarandon’s palm and back of the hand, with two prop pencils — devised by floor effects supervisor Michael Lantieri — mounted on either side, appearing as a single one. In conceiving the effect, the artist was inspired by Excalibur, where “Lancelot pulls the sword out and he kind of rolls to one side and yanks the tip off. When I originally saw the film, that scene just floored me. I couldn’t believe it. I rented the tape and watched it 20 times before I realized what they had done. I was so impressed with it that I decided to try it myself.”

Thus, one end of the pencil — which Sarandon pulled out of his palm — was a telescoping pencil, while the other one on the back of the hand was a collapsible piece, concurrently yanked off by a hidden wire. Smoke tubes concealed in the application provided further effect. The filmed effect was seamless, but risked losing its efficacy in the editing stage. Johnson recalled: “a funny thing happened with that shot before the final print. For some reason, Tom Holland had forgotten the whole point of the effect and, while editing, had put a cutaway to Charley right in the middle of the shot, causing the illusion to lose all impact. When I saw the rough cut, I pointed it out to him — he was always great about listening to our input — and he recut it.”

Like vampires of old, Dandridge has the ability to turn into a bat. Portraying this element in a convincing manner became a particular challenge for the special effects team, due to the inherently fantastic nature of the process. “Fright Night‘s effects are basically a series of transformation shots, which I never like,” said Bruno, who believed the transformation should be properly integrated into the action sequence. “We’re always looking for novel means of dealing with them, to achieve the shots in ways that have not been used before. What generally happens when you turn a man into a bat — or a werewolf, if you remember the old Lon Chaney movie — is that the film is going along and suddenly there’s a transition where you detach yourself from the movie to watch the change. The problem with that, of course, is that the audience immediately gets out their magnifying glass. If the tranformation is not done peerlessly or unexpectedly, then the drama is stopped short and the effect is invariably a failure.”

In the third act of the film, the cornered Dandridge jumps off a balcony and transforms, attacking Peter Vincent. Edlund and Bruno designed the morphing shot to be quick and smooth. “We tried to think as simply and economically as possible when designing the shot,” said Bruno. “So, we came up with the idea of having Chris Sarandon’s stunt double leap off the balcony and then pan off him to see the transformation happen as an animated shadow on the wall. The shadow would then gain out of frame and the Bat would move past us in the foreground.”

Mechanical effects supervisor Thaine Morris suspended the stuntman on wires against a bluescreen, with a three-quarters wall miniature serving as a background, shot separately. The animation department then devised the shadow transformation. Animation supervisor Terry Windell related: “we took the two elements — the stuntman and the hallway pan — and did a rough roto job, laying out where we thought the shadow positions should be and how long the pan would have to be. Then, we figured where the Bat would have to come through the scene. Bill Neil shot multiple takes of the Bat at various speeds, and Mark Vargo did a precomp of the stunt double, the background and the Bat. At that point, Sean Newton rotoscoped the man’s shadow, faking realistically what his shadow would look like on the wall. Then, he animated the transformation and a wing flap as the Bat begins to exit the scene. It was a difficult piece of animation because of the transformation and because as the shadow flits across the wall it is interrupted by beams, doors, plants and things; so, it had to contort to those shapes in order to look realistic. Sean did an incredibly convincing job.”

Vampire films of old often showed the titular villains turning into bats — mostly representations of real bats. Holland wanted to deviate from the norm, with a more fantastic design for the Dandridge Bat. He explained: “there’s never been a successful bat in any vampire movie I’ve ever seen. For Fright Night, I wanted to see a bat 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.”

The Bat was designed, sculpted and animated by Cook, who agreed with Holland: “I have always objected to the bats in the old movies as being a little bit too mundane,” the artist related, “so I thought it would be interesting to first keep the creature about the same size as the human vampire. In the script it specified that it was an enormous bat, so I figured, ‘why not just shift its mass around a little bit while retaining certain characteristics of the actor’s appearance in the face?’ So, we made it basically a fantasy bat.”

Initially, Cook wanted to incorporate elements of the Vampire actor into the sculpture of the Bat, but was hindered by an issue in production schedule: the sculpture had to be completed before the role was even cast. The solution to this conundrum was reverse-engineering the make-up designs. Cook explained: “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 make-up to an actor that would have various resonances of the Bat’s appearance. We also made sure that the colours in the final transformed creature were reminiscent of the colours in the make-up palette that the Vampire has when he’s at his most overt — the grayish, almost bluish skin against the burning eyes.”

The Bat’s wings would have to be properly translucent, like real membrane. Rather than painting wing detail with pigment — which would not react properly to back lighting — Cook decided to employ layers of pigmented rubber. “That would, when one was layered upon the other, give the impression of veins and fiber,” he said. “Mark Wilson got the unenviable task of designing the circulatory pattern in the wings. Once he’d done that, he sent it to a place that does engraving and copper etching, because I figured that airbrushing in something as delicate as the veins wouldn’t result in the proper density. Mark then sprayed on a few layers of rubber and laid the etched stencil onto that and sprayed the veins on, removed the stencil, cleaned it off, flipped it over and put it on the other wing — thereby ensuring symmetry and lack of duplication of work.”

Two Bat puppets were built, with foam latex skin cast from the same moulds: one, suspended by wires, was shot against bluescreen for the flying scenes. The other, a hand puppet, was used for interactions with the actors. The puppeteering crew included Cook himself, Johnson, John Axford, Kevin Brennan, Mark Wilson, and Screaming Mad George, with on-set touch-ups provided by Theresa Burkett. Cook originally envisioned the flying Bat as a stop-motion model; however, Edlund and Neil steered towards a suspended marionette. Cook was well aware of the risks that approach entailed. He recalled: “I was a little worried by the marionette approach because I’ve seen it done with small bats in fifty years of movies and it’s never been convincing to me. Marionettes often look as if they’re floating and weightless because their motivation comes from above and not from within.”

The flying Bat was realistically articulated, simulating muscular motion through puppetry. “Another difficult thing to do with a marionette is get the feeling of muscles working,” Cook continues. “We had the problem of the wings being stiff from the shoulder to the tips, so we rigged them at the shoulders, wrists and wingtips — motivating the movement from the wrist and wing and letting the shoulder follow. Of course, we had to make it look, through pantomime, as though the shoulder was the source of motivation for the action.

Shooting the creature at a normal frame rate would have been unfeasible. For better control over its performance, it was filmed at one to two frames per second. Cook related: “I knew that in order to get a look of power and solidity in the 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 control. I figured we could get optimal control by doing the pantomime in slow motion and shooting at about two frames per second — which is what we did.” In addition, “there is one shot where he zips by the camera which we shot a little bit quicker at quarter speed — 6 frames per second — and that worked, too. That latitude from one to six frames per seemed to be the best for our needs.”

The attack Bat was operated by hand for the head and jaw motion, cables for the facial expressions and rods for the limbs, with a total of nine puppeteers including Cook himself. “As far as the movement goes,” he said, “it was done in a very straightforward manner, with my poor bloody hand crammed into the mechanism that I had built just a little too tight. It was awful, but I wanted to make sure that it was my hand in there. Aside from the tight fit, I had the same problem that every other puppeteer of this sort has. You put your hand up inside and by the time you get a take that’s good, you have no strength left.”

Filming the attack Bat was no less of a challenge than its flying counterpart. “We would flail this silly thing around until some semblance of coordination fortuitously happened,” Cook recalled, “doing it over and over again until they got enough good pieces to cut it all together. The puppeteers did a really nice job of effacing themselves and keeping the work fairly subtle, using the extremes of movement when it counter and knocking it off when it wasn’t necessary. 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. Of course, the only real danger was that my hand might collapse and strangle him.”

Ironically, in one instance, McDowall ended up breaking the puppet’s head by pulling the bone too hard; subsequent reparations delayed filming of close-ups by two days. After several failed attempts to film the Bat biting the bone Peter Vincent holds, it was decided to shoot it in reverse, starting from its jaws clasping on the bone, with the puppet then pulled back.

In the climax of the film, Dandridge is struck by a fatal beam of light; he is hurled back against a wall and disintegrates in a fiery spectacle. This sequence involved a complex series of shots. First, a stuntman was placed on an air ram that threw him back around 20 feet; then, in the next shot, Sarandon (originally, a stuntman set on fire — unfeasible for a close-up shot) is launched backwards through frame, something that required a complex, moving set-up involving a track and a platform on top of it, shot at 12 frames per second. Green flames were later animated and rotoscoped in frame-by-frame by animation supervisor Garry Walker. For the following shot where Dandridge crashes into the wall, the camera was rotated 90 degrees and the stuntman — with his chest on fire — was dropped on a tilted set.

A liquid flashpaper dummy then explodes into green flames and red flares, with whiting out achieved by magnesium powder, all devised by mechanical effects supervisor Thaine Morris. For the shot of Dandridge’s rotting face burning, a rubber bust was devised, with a monstrous skull pushed via rod through the face as it peels away. The vampiric skull started from moulds of an unused transformation stage of the librarian ghost from Ghostbusters, which had been stored in the Columbia archives. “It was her skull that punches through Dandridge’s face,” said Bruno, “and, oddly enough, it really resembled our Bat.”

The Vampire skeleton was conceptualized by Johnson and Bruno and then executed by Dale Brady. “Our intention in designing the skeleton was to imply that Dandridge was attempting to turn back into a Bat but never makes it,” said Bruno. “It starts out as a normal human skeleton which then becomes more bat-like. We shortened its legs and extended the arms. The membrane burns away, the chest collapses and the head goes down.”

Makio Kida and Mark Wilson built the skeleton out of bondo and acrylics; it was operated through a fireproof wall in a parking lot. “It was capable of kicking around quite a lot,” said Johnson. “We had rotted skin built up all over it and ten organs inside the chest that pumped until it melted. we also hooked up flame jets inside the eyes and mouth so they could shoot long streams of fire. We mixed magnesium powder into melted wax, then brushed that compound over the bones to add some sparkle. The combination of our orange flame with the intense green flame that Thaine came up with turned out to be really interesting.” Johnson added: “they added a degree of fantasy to it because we got a Disney-like image of green fire from below while the body itself burned orange with all these sparks.” Dandridge finally disappears with a green flame — another optical element — ending his reign of terror.

Edlund concluded: “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. The design attitude must be brought in immediately and the show shot around the effects so that the effects go precisely into place. If the effect is revealed for only a brief moment, the audience will always think they saw more than they did, but it’s hard for a lot of directors to understand that, because when they see the pricetag on a $100.000 shot, they want to be sure they’re getting what they paid for. In reality, they do get it when when less is actually shown, provided what is seen is really convincing.”

“They really did excellent work,” Holland stated. “Also, I like them very much. I really am fond of those guys because at first they didn’t know me and I didn’t know them. But as we got to know and trust each other, they began to support my vision and to find ways to make it work. They became tremendously supportive and would take what I gave them and improve on it one million percent.”

For more pictures of the Vampires, visit the Monster Gallery.