Halloween Thoughts! Fright Night 1 - 7/11

Ah, we are approaching Halloween, and love it or hate it, it's that time of year where the mind sort of drifts towards things of the occult, and the nature of that. Since I was a child, I was always fascinated with good and bad, Heaven and Hell, and the forces of nature that propigate that. I had a special fascination with vampires, and no, not the high maintenance, MTV and "Twilight" types, but the old school, dark, evil, truly primeval and hideous vampires, and vampire fokelore. But, then again, I was also obssessed with Greek mythology, LOL.

Stephen King's "Salem's Lot" both the book, which I read countless times before I was even 10 years old, and the movie, which had me transfixed with delicious horror when I was around 10, was the the quintessential prototype of what I thought vampirism was, and I had carried that idea with me until I hit around 19 years old, and I read the Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice. I was immediately in love, a little guiltily, with how these vampires still had a hand in their humanity, yet retained that nauseaous death about them. I could handle that compromise, that balance. I wasn't truly the purist I thought myself to be!
Years later, and I still have a guilty softspot in my fascination with vampires, probably a remnant of youth, but when the annoyingly and cloyingly saccharine vampires of "Twilight" were introduced, it was, almost, all puns intended, the final nail in the coffin. They had made vampires into a franchise, with the "Twilight" series as the pinnacle of it, literally the Super Walmart of the vampire stereotypes. It was enough to make me barf! So, I let the fascination go to sleep, like so many other things you leave behind.

Ah, but then, the other day, I remembered my all-time favorite, sexiest on screen vampire, HANDS DOWN. I smiled, and took a trip down memory lane, with Jerry Dandridge bringing me back to greener pastures...I remember watching Chris Sarandon, and my heart literally melting in my chest, by how incredibly good looking, charismatic, and just damn HOT he was in "Fright Night." The movie had a really enjoyable story line, stuck to most of the vampire "rules" about sunlight, crosses/crucifixes, and the plain old downside of being evil, and has just the appropriate touch of 80s campiness to be what I consider the ideal vampire movie!
Plus, I think this scene in "Fright Night" is just so damned sexy, whew, it's like eating hotsauce straight from the bottle!  I love the play of virtue and giving into decadence, and how even Amy's hair reveals she is going wild, and "blossoming;" how she is making the wrong choice, but she runs and embraces it...there is so much that can be read into the scene, but, that's not the purpose of this post :-)   Start the scene at about 1:40 in, and just ENJOY ;-)