When The Man Comes Around
The Guest, Fright Night, and the American Stranger
It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!
–Kyle Reese, The Terminator (1984), written and directed by James Cameron
Everybody won’t be treated all the same/There’ll be a golden ladder reaching down/When the man comes around.
–Johnny Cash, “When The Man Comes Around”
American horror cinema loves an uninvited guest. In a vast and punishingly drivable country there are always more places to be unwelcome, and a storied filmic tradition makes victims of the accidental interloper, the (sometimes dubiously) innocent traveler who goes a little too far, takes a path they shouldn’t, and finds themselves in a place they do not belong. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is animated by this nauseating fear of a single wrong turn, as is The Blair Witch Project, both ur-texts of modern American horror about that irreversible step into someone else’s yard; it’s a through-line that stretches through the more recent history of the genre, from Don’t Breathe to Get Out. Sometimes, however, the yard is yours; sometimes the uninvited guest is the threat, the thing on the doorstep, the monster under the bed, the splash of blood on the hardwood floor of a hard-won sanctuary. Michael Myers comes to Haddonfield; the call is coming from inside the house; The Strangers prey at night. Sometimes the visitor looks friendly enough; sometimes you are drawn to them, unwittingly or otherwise, a bolt from the blue in a place that changes slowly, a flash of sexual energy in a place where no one fucks. Sometimes you open the door yourself. Sometimes you let them in.
Neither Fright Night (1985) nor The Guest (2014) stand among the most harrowing American nightmares, though in my view both are terrific films; there is a strong undercurrent of play in both, of fun, a winking sense that all this scary stuff is cool, at least until it’s not. A certain warmth and agreeableness at the level of tone corresponds nicely to the text of both films, each of which concerns a visitor who is alluring as well as dangerous, a seductive presence, a guy you want to get to know. These are movies in which the central horror is that the Devil is real and your mom can’t get enough of him; behold a pale horse, and he’s drinking your father’s beer. They’re films that seduce as well as threaten, films about masculinity and sexual temptation, and of course—as ever—films about the built landscape of America, the kinds of places we try to be safe, and the kinds of demons that find us there. In their thematic and aesthetic similarities they speak to a shared ambivalence about the “uninvited” interloper, a sense that we have created the conditions in which monsters thrive; our throats are all bared in a thousand different ways, and there’s no sense acting surprised when someone finally takes a drink.
Tom Holland’s Fright Night opens with a scene from a movie within the movie, a black-and-white horror B-picture starring Roddy McDowall’s fictional actor/vampire killer, Peter Vincent. Vincent hosts the late-night horror show from which Fright Night takes his name, and which lends the film its welcome (though never overpowering) sense of playfulness and camp. “What if one of these old movies was real and had a normal guy in it” is the clear conceit, and it’s one that was very much in the water in the late 70s and early 80s: Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot—which received an underrated 1979 adaptation at the hands of Tobe Hooper—took “Dracula in modern America” as its more or less undisguised premise, and John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London (1981) does more or less the same thing with the iconic image of the wolfman on the moors. What Fright Night shares with these somewhat earlier contemporaries (to varying degrees) is a laudable straightforwardness in its treatment of the pertinent mythology, a willingness to play out this central scenario without much in the way of subversion or misdirection. 17-year-old Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale)’s new neighbor, Jerry Dandridge (Chris Sarandon), is a vampire; he kills human beings and drinks their blood; he can turn into a bat or a cloud of mist, and he sleeps in a coffin. Okay, the movie asks; what now?
The nature of family property shapes this narrative in countless ways. The whole premise rests on a particular vision of The Neighborhood, a kind of community you can live in without ever really joining it; in Reagan’s America a man’s home is his castle, and in the atomized world of the picket-fence suburb a neighbor’s home is close but not too close, a kingdom all its own, unknowable behind its closed doors and drawn shades. Charley’s first arm’s-length encounter with Dandridge is simply a funhouse-mirror version of a more prosaic experience, that of peering through the window while two men move in next door, wondering what will go on in there, wondering how they live. That it is two men, Jerry Dandridge and his companion Billy (Jonathan Stark), is not a coincidence; LGBTQ readings of this relationship are as old as the film, and it is hard not to see some reflection of this in Charley’s suspicion and hostility towards Dandridge, otherwise well-founded though it might be. It would be easy to see this subtext as weaponizing cheap homophobia—the blood-drinking monster is also gay!—but it doesn’t really play that way in practice. The relationship between the two men seems casually intimate, unstudied, humanizing, one of many suggestions that Dandridge has a richer and more mature inner life than the slightly boorish teenager he finds in his sights. He and Billy might be killers, but at least they’ve got each other, and we feel a whisper of sympathy for their desire to be left alone.
Given the importance of the film’s residential setting, perhaps the most essential piece of vampire lore to be mobilized in Fright Night is the vampire’s need for an invitation to enter a home, the sense of a house as inviolable until you choose to let down your guard. One of the film’s most effective early moments sees Charley, armed with advice from his genre-savvy friend Evil Ed (Stephen Geoffreys), nailing shut his windows and fortifying his room with crosses against the possibility of a nocturnal bat incursion, only to be called downstairs by his cheerful mother, who wants him to meet their guest: Jerry Dandridge, cool as you like in their living room, having easily talked his way into an invitation. Fright Night’s vampire is authentically monstrous deep down, as a subsequent confrontation in Charley’s room reveals, but on the surface he is charm personified—Chris Sarandon gives an electric performance—and that tool makes him a maddening opponent, someone who can use Charley’s mother against him, someone whose partner can talk to the cops. He’s a supernatural being but also, quite simply, an adult, and Charley finds himself initially outmatched on both fronts. Against an enemy with this set of tools, not even the sacred space of the home is safe.
In this lopsided struggle sex appeal is one of Dandridge’s great weapons, and indeed sex is a strong undercurrent in Fright Night, a consistent preoccupation, an occasional threat. As the film opens Charley and his girlfriend Amy (Amanda Bearse) are fooling around in his room, and his attempts to pressure her to go further—followed by his oblivious response to her subsequent decision to consent—generate an early conflict between them. To a young straight guy trying anything to get laid, Dandridge represents a baffling and infuriating opponent: partnered with a man, but irresistible to women, possessed both of a nature Charley reflexively fears and the qualities he desperately wants. This contradiction comes to a head when Dandridge, in a showstopping sequence in a pulsating nightclub, seduces Amy and brings her back to his home. Shortly afterwards there follows a genuinely remarkable scene in which, in the throes of an obvious sexual embrace, Dandridge bites Amy and begins her transformation into a vampire. As a visual metaphor for the moment of first penetration this could scarcely be more overt, and the stakes (truly sorry) have now become sexual in a genuinely unexpected way: Dandridge has not only captured Amy but claimed her, taken Charley’s place, escalated their relationship in ways that Charley could not. It’s a messy, provocative moment in a movie which, for all its flourishes of humor and understandable relish in its remarkable practical effects, repeatedly proves that it’s taking all this business seriously.
If Amy is not saved she will lose her soul; vampires in Fright Night are ontologically evil, whatever we may think of Dandridge, with his long-term boyfriend and his easy charm. Yet the offer he makes is a compelling one, and those closest to Charley are vulnerable to it, for reasons that flatter neither him nor his broader social world. Amy is vulnerable to adult male attention, to offers of genuine intimacy, while a guy like Evil Ed - repeatedly gay-coded in the movie - can be easily lured by the promise of belonging, the sense that finally someone will take him as he is. “I know what it’s like being different,” says Dandridge to Ed as he offers the boy eternal life. “And they won’t pick on you anymore, or beat you up. I’ll see to that.” Abusive and heteropatriarchal structures conspire to make damnation sound a little bit like heaven. Charley represents the forces of good, of course, but also the very power relations that give Dandridge his opening, the status quo his victory will surely restore. The nice young girl should sleep with her boyfriend, who loves her really, though he’s often thoughtless and handsy; the socially undesirable boy should know better than to imagine there is somewhere he will really fit in. A nice, normal family should move in next door, not those two (whisper it) men with their strange hours and their strange ways. Sure, America’s got its problems, we might imagine the argument running, but it still beats the forces of darkness. Fright Night, a satisfyingly thorny product of the 80s, gives us just enough space to wonder if we agree.
By contrast with Fright Night, Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett’s The Guest (2014) is a sunny enough movie that we know its titular figure, played with easy good humor and drawling courtesy by Dan Stevens, is unlikely to be a vampire. Indeed, he’s first introduced running along a dusty field at sunrise, army duffel on his back, destination unknown. From the film’s title and its genre trappings we know enough to suspect he is not what he seems, and to fear for Laura Peterson (Sheila Kelley) and her family when he rings their doorbell and introduces himself as David, a friend of her son Caleb. Caleb Peterson, we soon learn, is dead, and the arrival of David, who served alongside him in Afghanistan, who claims to have been with him at the very end, acts on the Peterson family like pressure on a raw nerve: whatever fragile equilibrium they’ve found in the aftermath of Caleb’s death is threatened, their vulnerabilities exposed with seemingly no effort on David’s part at all. Caleb’s father Spencer (the remarkably underrated Leland Orser, making precise choices throughout) is struggling to support his family; Spencer and Laura’s son Luke (Brendan Meyer, quietly Stevens’s key comedic foil) is relentlessly bullied at school; Luke’s older sister Anna (Maika Monroe, in the midst of a horror annus mirabilis), skeptical of David from the jump, struggles under the thumb of her parents and the leaden gravity of her dead-end town. Everybody has their problems, and David, with his graceful soldier’s manners and no apparent agenda of his own, is here to help.
The early stretches of the film in which we see what David’s help looks like have an infectious energy undiminished by the knowledge that the other shoe must eventually drop. A decisive early sequence sees him track Luke’s high school bullies to a roadside bar where the football team can drink without ID; he goads them into a fight and dispatches them in a display of thrilling excess, a grown man beating teenagers with pool cues and breaking glass bottles over their heads. The way he moves recalls a machine, all precise, crisp movements and whiplike turns to confront a new threat, and offers more than a hint of The Teminator (1984) in the DNA of The Guest, with its implacable central figure who seemingly does not feel pain. David is more T-1000 than T-800, capable of charm and subterfuge, and in Luke’s company he starts to take on an almost mythic aspect. So too with Anna, who reluctantly invites him to a party at her friend’s house and gets to see him, as it were, at his leisure. During this scene there’s a closeup of David taking a long pull on a joint, the flare of its ember bright orange against the shifting neon lights of the house, that gives us the full force of his charisma, his slight aura of menace leavened—or is it?—by his willingness to partake. Seeing this through Anna’s eyes we know she is starting to be captivated, a concerning prospect, but one we can’t help but understand. We know David can’t be trusted, but it’s fun to watch him work.
Much is made at the party of David’s military service, and America’s war in Afghanistan provides a key thematic undercurrent for The Guest, a more than simply convenient narrative explanation for this handsome stranger and the things he can do. At first glance David’s veteran status seems subversive in a fun but rather obvious way; Dan Stevens, especially in the early scenes, leans heavily on the aw-shucks earnestness, and we smile knowingly, imagining that the façade of the everyman soldier will put everyone at ease here in Troop Nation. Yet in fact it doesn’t quite work out this way. Spencer frets openly about the possibility that David might have “the PTSD, or whatever,” and the crucial house party scene features a kind of “funny how?” episode in which David pretends to confront an affable stoner about his supposedly ironclad support for the troops. “You wouldn’t support us by, like, enlisting,” he says icily, and no one quite knows how to answer; in this place the things he’s done and seen command respect but not understanding, and create a distance between David and everyone else that might serve his secretive purposes better than unqualified regard. This is almost a reactionary argument, a First Blood-esque jab at the hypocrisy of a nation that won’t do what it takes to win, but what we eventually learn of David’s origins makes that interpretation difficult to sustain. This is a man who has been engineered to kill, a weapon as artificial as any Terminator, and he represents a country whose problem is not that they’re unwilling to use him. They just don’t want to see him come home.
There is a good deal of Fright Night in The Guest, both in its general outline and in some of its key moments. Anna’s dilemma is essentially Charley’s, the growing certainty that a strange visitor is not what he appears to be, the maddening impossibility of convincing the people who matter to you. There is something, too, about that pivotal scene at the house party, with its neon lights and small seductions, that recalls at a distance the nightclub scene in Fright Night, two critical turning points in tonal and visual conversation. But perhaps the strongest parallel is that David, like Dandridge, stands for inconvenient truths, offering Faustian bargains that target genuine unmet needs. Spencer does want that promotion at work; Luke should be allowed to stand up to those bullies; Anna does deserve better than her drip of a secret boyfriend. David’s solutions to these problems may be no more palatable than vampirism, but his very presence exposes them, makes the Petersons’ status quo—like Amy’s, and Evil Ed’s—seem absurdly fragile and unsatisfying. And then, of course, there is the war, in its thirteenth year at the time of The Guest’s release, a distant black hole no one looks at directly, a set of forelock-tugging pieties everyone mostly talks around. Shortly after meeting Laura, David examines a kind of memorial shrine to Caleb on the Petersons’ mantle and points out a photo of himself, unmistakable in his dusty fatigues, grinning along with the rest of Caleb’s unit. He’s been there all along, and nobody knew; nobody quite looked closely enough at this thing they were supposed to revere. Now they no longer have a choice.
For all David and Dandridge’s shared qualities, the spaces they haunt could not appear more different. The nature of the cinematic suburb changed drastically between The Guest and Fright Night, in a way strangely prefigured by Craig Gillespie’s underrated 2011 remake of the latter. That film, starring Colin Farrell in (shocker) a marvelously charismatic performance as Dandridge, is set in the sprawling cookie-cutter suburbs of Las Vegas; gone is the leafy Anytown quality of the original film, which shot key residential exteriors on a former Disney set. The comparative barrenness of the American Southwest, the identikit subdivisions arrayed in rows across the desert, only enhances the feeling of atomic isolation that was already so crucial to Holland’s original enterprise. Neighbors have never felt further apart than this, and the vast empty sky makes it seem like there is nowhere for Charley to hide. The Guest’s New Mexico locations give it a similar quality; its setting is too rural even to constitute a suburb, an assortment of roadside bars and unassuming cornfields that has nothing much at all to do with Albuquerque. The City of Moriarty, we read at one point, but we never see much sign of a city; even “town” seems potentially generous from the glimpses we get. Here everything is a car ride away, and there’s space enough to find all sorts of trouble.
This feels, at least in its broad strokes, like a setting that Wingard and Barrett know, and one of The Guest’s great aesthetic strengths is its relative specificity. It is, for one thing, a movie heavily built around its soundtrack, a wonderfully eclectic mix of synthwave, 80s goth-rock, and electropop artists like Annie, whose “Anthonio” plays over the film’s climax. This movie was my introduction to the synthwave act SURVIVE, soon to become famous for their soundtrack to Stranger Things, and there is some superficial basis for comparison between that show and The Guest. Both certainly wear their affection for a certain era of horror on their sleeves; The Guest gives us Fright Night and The Terminator, to be sure, but also of course Halloween (1978), with its murderous stranger trailed by a man who knows his history. But Stranger Things, for all the virtues of (especially) its excellent first season, is pure pastiche, a show that looks and sounds like it does because it knows that look and that sound are what’s expected of it. The soundtrack to The Guest, by contrast, is believably Anna’s music, and the setting of The Guest is believably Anna’s home, a mostly lower-middle-class milieu with none of the generic prosperity of horror’s iconic and oft-parodied white-flight suburbs. People around here need things, and they might not look too closely at a guy who says he can provide them. More’s the pity.
Landscapes like these, the history of the genre suggests, attract monsters by their nature, and both Dandridge and David are fishing in bountiful waters. The suburban vampire is the scourge of an atomized society, of a place where promises of community prove hollow at the first time of asking; behind closed doors a wealthy predator like Dandridge can do anything he likes, and a dying woman’s scream might reach nobody she knows. David, meanwhile, represents the twin specters of war and economic downturn, a weapon of empire turned loose in the imperial core, an eager helpmate for people who might be safe from him if they were just a little less broke. “Cash is easy to get,” he says at one point, dismissively, an early hint that he’s not like these people, for whom every dollar is hard-fought. The dad desperate for someone to vent to who isn’t his financial dependent, the diner waitress who knows she’s in danger but can’t walk out on a shift; these are the prey animals of this particular American backwater, and David is the ultimate wolf in sheep’s clothing. He and Dandridge stalk two very different Americas, but both spaces have been made ready for the bloodletting.
Yet David and Dandridge have been made ready also, and each obeys the dictates of a nature he did little to choose. Dandridge may be a killer, but as he points out to Charley, he’s simply feeding as best he can, and if Evil Ed displays some relish in his own damnation, we can certainly understand why. David, in his turn, has been forged by war, neurologically conditioned to protect the military experiment that built him; “I doubt he could stop himself now, even if he wanted to,” says the sorely-missed Lance Reddick as the shadowy defense contractor for whom David represents a project gone awry. A healthy society might not create victims for these strangers, but the strangers themselves might be victims of a sort: of homophobia and social stigma, of a military machine that runs on blood. Hurt people hurt people, as the saying goes, and if the monsters in these films are not always people, they nonetheless have grievances aplenty.
Perhaps, in the end, we get the guests we are owed; perhaps there is an element of guilt in our horrified fascination with the dark and mysterious visitor, a sense that every knock on the door might at last be an overdue reckoning. The Petersons might not deserve David, but you can certainly argue America does; we created him, created the global military regime that nurtured him, created the spaces where he thinks he can hide. Reagan’s America, too, might just deserve Dandridge, with its monomaniacal focus on the family, its war on authentic social bonds, its insistence that the marginal be content with their leavings. Social and sexual oppression always compound and ramify, and imperial wars always come home. Perhaps the thrill of these films comes from pretending to forget, pretending we don’t know where all this goes, pretending that we might not have it coming. Perhaps we watch to learn about ourselves, see which windows we’ve left unlocked, which temptations will lead us to ruin; we hear the knock, and we open the door, and we see what kind of stranger we’ve made. We invite them in, of course. It’s the least we can do.
Fantastic stuff as usual Peter
"QUIS EST ISTE QUI UENIT"