Development While writing the script for
Cloak & Dagger,
Tom Holland amused himself when he conceived the idea of a horror-movie fan becoming convinced that his next-door neighbor was a vampire, but he did not initially think this premise was enough to sustain a story. "What's he gonna do", Holland asked, "because everybody's gonna think he's mad!" The story percolated in his mind for a year and finally one day while discussing it with John Byers, then the head of story department at
Columbia Pictures, Once he'd conceived that character, Holland knocked out the first draft of the script in three weeks. and he had developed enough clout from the successes of his screenplays for
Class of 1984,
Psycho II, and
Cloak & Dagger that the head of Columbia Pictures said, "Let's take a chance on the hot screenwriter kid", Guy McElwaine, then the head of Columbia Pictures, suggested
Roddy McDowall for the part. McDowall had already starred in the Holland-penned film
Class of 1984, so Holland was immediately receptive to the suggestion. "He understood the part", commented Holland, "and he also understood what he could do with it, and he
really wanted it!" Holland and McDowall built a lasting friendship, and McDowall eventually invited Holland to a dinner party where he introduced him to Vincent Price, who was flattered that the part was an homage to him and commented that the film "was wonderful and he thought Roddy did a wonderful job." Although he liked the screenplay, Sarandon was still leery of working with a first-time director, so he flew to Los Angeles to meet Tom Holland and producer
Herb Jaffe. Holland and he had an immediate rapport (and went on to make several more films together), and Sarandon was awed that Holland had the film so completely mapped out that he "literally described the movie shot-by-shot all the way through – page-by-page, scene-by-scene. It was basically the way he shot it." The gap worked to his advantage, however, because it gave him time to hit the gym and bulk up so he would not have to wear padding in the film. but he lost the role to
Eric Stoltz. Casting director
Jackie Burch remembered his audition though, and thought he would be right to portray Charley Brewster. Ragsdale auditioned several times and ultimately received the news that he had landed the part on Halloween night 1984, Due to a mix-up,
Stephen Geoffreys had an awkward audition for
Anthony Michael Hall's role in
Weird Science, The September 6, 1984, draft of the screenplay, which is circulating online, Holland encouraged the cast to write biographies of their characters so they would completely understand their motivations and be able to draw on that information while filming their scenes. "This is a man who has been hunted for all his post-human existence, but who has fallen in love a number of times, and who in a sense, longs for a normal existence." Sarandon also did research into bats and discovered that most of the world's bat populations are
frugivores, so he concluded, "Jerry had a lot of fruit bat in his DNA." This explains why his character is frequently munching on apples, which Sarandon decided his character was using to "cleanse his palate" Despite the pathetic character he was portraying, McDowall was a pillar for the cast and crew. "He was a kind of
Yoda on the set", commented Sarandon. Recalled Ragsdale, "He had his videocamera on his shoulder and he was shooting, like, family movies the whole time." The scene also established Amy discovering Jerry actually was a vampire.
Filming Principal photography commenced on December 3, 1984, and wrapped on February 23, 1985. At the time of production,
Fright Night was Columbia's lowest-budgeted film and they did not have high expectations for it, so they were focusing all of their attention on the
John Travolta/
Jamie Lee Curtis film
Perfect, which they were certain was going to be a blockbuster. The most excruciating part of the makeup process for the cast was the contact lenses. In those days, the lenses were hard plastic, which
Steve Johnson hand-painted (throwing some glitter into the mix), lacquered, and sanded. Many scenes were shot with his foot in a cast, including the scene in which Jerry comes to Charley's room to attack him. For shots in which Charley's feet were visible, the costumers slit Ragsdale's shoes in several places, slipped them on and then covered the portions of white cast that peeked through the slits with black cloth. ==Soundtrack==