Kinda mid, kinda fun.

Like it or not, Tom Holland, the original writer and director of the cult classic film, has returned to Fright Night. Fright Night: Aftermath, a direct sequel to the film (and the recently released novelization by the creator (see my review on the site), follows Charley Brewster, Peter Vincent, and Amy, picking up right where the movie ended. As hinted at in the movie, Evil Ed is not only alive but eager to avenge and resurrect his master, which may be a possibility thanks to a dark grimoire owned by the recently slain Jerry Dandridge, basically a how-to manual on all things vampire and dark magic. While Charley and Peter are grilled by police, Evil Ed begins building his own group of ghouls in his effort to bring back his late master. The end result is an uneven, but surprisingly readable and at times even enjoyable trip down memory lane.

            Fright Night, quite frankly, is one of my favorite vampire films and favorite horror films of the 80s. While at times campy, it was also ahead of its time – a referential “meta” story, in essence, an 80s retelling of Dracula. When I discovered that Tom Holland had not only gone back and adapted his script but also wrote a sequel (with at LEAST one more to come), I was excited. Both books, each with a different co-author, are hardly Shakespeare in their prose. The writing at times is clunky at best. Whether due to co-writer A. Jack Ulrich or perhaps Holland himself, Aftermath is a bit more well-written than the adaptation. While some of the dialogue is corny, it was corny in the film, too. The authors do a good job of dropping pop culture and current event references from the late 80s to help take the reader back, and thanks to the help of the creator, the characters of Charley, Peter, and Evil Ed, are pretty on point.

            The magical element to the story is an odd, at times distracting addition to the mythos. Evil Ed, ordered by his master to secure the grimoire before his death, unleashes its magic, catching the attention of other magic users who come to investigate. Evil Ed is fun, but hardly an evil genius, and the fact that Amy, once she learns that her former blood-sucking lover might be able to be brought back to life, goes along with it, is odd. But the reality is, you can’t come into something like this with hard expectations, at least in my opinion. I have said for years that this tendency to create sequels decades after the original is often problematic and disappointing to fans if you get your hopes up. Like it or not, this is the sequel we get.

            The book (both of them, frankly) lacks the fresh funkiness of the original and the charisma and chemistry of the actors. That being said, once the plot gets going, it isn’t all that bad, enough that I’ll probably read the next.