Fright Night

Charley Brewster sees a coffin carried into the house next door and a series of local women turn up dead. Nobody listens, so he turns to Peter Vincent, the fading star of a late-night horror show, who has spent his career pretending to fight vampires and does not want to meet a real one.

Tom Holland wrote and directed it as a love letter to the Hammer era, and it works because it takes the friendship and the fear seriously while the effects run riot.

Chris Sarandon plays the vampire as a charming, modern seducer, and Roddy McDowall's Peter Vincent, terrified and broke, is the heart of it.

The transformation effects, by Richard Edlund's team, are enormous and practical, and the nightclub dance sequence is one of the great vampire seductions.

Remade in 2011 with Colin Farrell, which is decent and not this.