While the Ryan people were announcing that he wasn’t running for President (sigh), I was out watching FRIGHTNIGHT. Very enjoyable vampire movie that does a smart job of incorporating some of the anxieties of the Great Recession. That is tougher to do than it sounds. The Great Recession has coincided with a decline in violent crime. That makes it harder to credibly ground horror in the everyday. FRIGHTNIGHT mixes not-so-new family disruption with Great Recession elements of home abandonment, and residential transience (it is set in a Las Vegas exurb) to create a recognizable and plausible landscape for the fantastic elements of the film. Families you know just disappear -and not because of vampires. Houses stand empty. Social networks become both smaller and more tenuous. And yet there is, initially, a very suburban (and suburban contemporary) lack of fear of radical violence. The protagonist worries that his (single) mother will be romantically taken advantage of by the hunky and a bit sleazy neighbor. There is a scene where a nerdy kid, having just seen his closest friendship destroyed, is skateboarding at night. His worst fear is of a local bully. For all their real troubles, they have only the faintest idea of how on their own they really are.
