Metacritic reviews

What makes Fright Night such a hoot to this day, on top of the great performances, is the deft blending of humor and suspense that Holland manages to build in his story.

Directed by Tom Holland, who serves up the oldest horror-yarn clich'es with a straight face, keeping the action good-natured and even humorous until the gory climax.

A minor classic of the genre, this is a memorable addition to the vampire tradition in the horror film.

Fright Night is not a distinguished movie, but it has a lot of fun being undistinguished.

Director Tom Holland keeps the picture wonderfully simple and entirely believable (once the existence of vampires is accepted, of course).

A farrago of cartoonish exaggeration (mouthfuls of fangs, razor-sharp talons and eyes like burning coals), knowing humour and '80s camp, it shouldn't even begin to work, and yet, strangely, it does, sort of, thanks to the assured handling of writer/director Holland, and two performances in particular - Geoffreys as Charley's pal Evil, and McDowall as the timid vampire killer.

The movie is bloody and gruesome and quite harmless, just the way they made them "in the good old days." [02 Aug 1985, p.C7]

Though Mr. Holland's handling of his stars is successful enough to establish him as a newcomer with promise, his material here is uneven and often flat.

Fright Night is really "Fright Lite," a film promising more than it delivers, and even that delivery is so late in the game that you may want to arrive fashionably late and skip what passes for plot development and concentrate on Richard Edlund's special effects. [05 Aug 1985, p.B3]

A chiller that, except for the last half hour of ghoulish effects, is undeadly dull. [02 Aug 1985, p.23]