It is time to acknowledge the brilliance of the minimalist monster movie Night Fright (1967), directed by James Sullivan, editor of Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966). Not only is the film a chilling creature feature, it is also a good example of the shifts in values moving from the 1960s toward the 1970s.
Some of your universe's critics are flummoxed by the brilliance of Night Fright. For example, reviewer mark.waltz writes, "Dreadfully boring and beyond recommendation, this combination mutant monster movie and beach party movie without a beach is insipidness at its most absurd." Reviewer rangeriderrango writes, " I wish I could get back the 85 minutes of my life that I wasted watching this crap." And reviewer soulexpress writes, "The writing, acting, and production values are only a smidgen above MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE."
Read on for the truth about Night Fright...
The film begins like many great films, with a young couple necking in a car while something crashes out of the sky. (The latter detail is relayed via a report on the car radio.) The camera’s POV approaches the necking couple. Suddenly, the woman screams.
The filmmakers cut to another young woman laughing in front of a sorority house as she discusses young men with her friend. As particularly jaunty music plays, her boyfriend Chris arrives in his car. In a sequence made up mostly of idiosyncratic zooms and jaunty jazz, Chris and Judy drive to a spot in the forest. Walking a few yards into the woods, Judy says, “Say, isn’t this the spot where the flying saucer landed?”
“Oh, the radio only said a flaming object,” Chris replies. “It could have a been a shooting star, a satellite, or anything like that.”
“Okay, boy, I’d like to think it was a flying saucer with little green men that come to say, ‘Take me to your leader.’”
Chris gets serious. “Have you ever thought about…well, sometimes when I’m alone, I think about the things we don’t know about…about the sky and the Earth and the air and the wind. Even this leaf.”
As Chris pontificates, there is a sudden cut to another car of college students who invite Chris and Judy to the beach to “have a dance.” Chris declines and the other young people drive away.
Chris playfully chases Judy through the woods for a long, long time until Judy sees something and begins to scream. In another shock cut, the filmmakers cut to the title sequence featuring the blaring siren and red light of a police car.
The police arrive at the forest, represented by Sheriff John Agar. They are not at the site of Judy’s discovery, but at a nearby site where the fireball crashed. Sheriff Agar is perturbed because a group of “government boys” has already arrived and won’t let him see whatever horror Judy discovered. Moments later, a car arrives and pipe-puffing Professor Clayton arrives; the professor is an old friend of Sheriff Agar but he was called in by the “government boys.” (The phrase “government boys” is repeated at least three times in this scene — a sign of consistently excellent screenwriting.)
When a radio call about Judy’s discovery comes in, Sheriff Agar asks his deputy, “What’s up?”
“Pat says it’s murder.”
“Where?”
“Satan’s Hollow.”
We find out the girl from the couple in the opening is dead but the boy is alive. Soon, the local newspaperman, Wes, arrives to help the lawmen look for clues. After several minutes of searching, Sheriff Agar hears a noise and draws his weapon, but it is only, comically, a group of hogs rooting through the forest.
Eventually, they find an animal track. The deputy says, “A bull gator leaves tracks something like this.” However, the animal leaving the track appears to be walking on two feet, and the tracks are much bigger than a gator’s.
Sheriff Agar also finds some hair hanging on a tree branch, so he takes it and puts it in his shirt pocket.
Then there is more, much more, walking through the forest, searching for clues. (Please note that these scenes of walking will soon be balanced out by skillfully executed presentations of complex backstory.)
The college students on their way to a cabin party drive up to Sheriff Agar and he tells them they can’t be in the forest. Things get heated when the sheriff says, “I’m about to lose my patience.”
One of the students, Bowers, says angrily, “Well I’ve already lost mine, fuzz.”
Sheriff Agar grabs Bowers by the shirt. “Look, punk, don’t ever call me fuzz. When you talk to me, you call me Sheriff. Now get out of here!”
The students drive away, nearly running over the deputy, who takes a giant leap of logic when he tells Sheriff Agar, “You don’t suppose there’s any connection between the rocket and this thing?”
“No, I don’t see how,” says Sheriff Agar. “Come on, we’ve got work to do.”
At the local soda fountain, Bower and his cohorts discuss their disappointment about cancelling the cabin party. Bowers complains about sheriffs, “You pin one of those dime store badges on ‘em and all of the sudden they’re big men from tough town.”
We also learn through local gossip that one of the female students, Darlene, is the sister of Joan, a nurse who happens to be engaged to Sheriff Agar. We also find out that Chris used to be engaged to Darlene before he started seeing Judy, and Darlene is now Bowers’s girlfriend. Not only that, but the state police are unresponsive to Sheriff Agar because the chief of the state police is friends with the man whom Sheriff Agar beat in the county election by a landslide.
Meanwhile, Bowers and a large group of his friends have driven to their lake cabin to have a “beach party,” which consists of dancing on blankets as the sun goes down.
As the deputy drives toward Satan’s Hollow, he sees the monster, though it is difficult to see in the dark. The camera pushes in on the deputy as he desperately calls for help over the radio.
After more scenes of young adults dancing, Chris confronts Bowers and tells him they should break up the party because it’s dangerous. Chris beats up Bowers quickly, then drives away, having proved his point. The young adults decide to leave and go to a heated swimming pool in town, but Bowers and Darlene stay by the lake. They climb into their convertible, where they are easy targets for the monster, who is more clearly visible here as a yeti-type creature.
It kills Bowers but Darlene runs, eventually meeting up with her sister and Sheriff Agar, who fires his weapon at the monster. He tells his fiancée to drive away, then, unsurprisingly, chases the monster through the woods, allowing us an even better look at the creature.
Nearby, Chris and Judy drive through the woods. They find the deputy’s car and the deputy’s body. Sheriff Agar stumbles upon them and the three of them drive back to town, where the sheriff asks the state police again to send help. Fortunately, someone (perhaps his highly skilled nurse fiancée) has created a sling for his left arm, presumably injured in his brush with the monster.
Professor Clayton arrives at the sheriff’s office to provide some helpful information. “When I was at Cape Kennedy, I was involved in space research. Well, it was top secret work, so naturally there were some people I had to check with before I could give you any information.” He adds, “We were involved in a program called Operation Noah’s Ark. The purpose of the project was to try to ascertain the effects of cosmic radiation on live animals. Well, we sent a rocket further out into space than any rocket containing life had ever gone. It contained over 40 different kinds of animal life. But when it got 300,000 miles out, which is well beyond the moon, we lost contact.” He explains the space ark had been gone six months before returning to Earth last night. “Clint, I can’t begin to describe the horror of what we found inside that wreckage. I’ll never forget the sight of those horrible mutations.”
Sheriff Agar gives Chris, whose father helpfully owns a construction company, a list of things he needs to stop the mutant monster. Then the middle-aged white male sheriff, assistant deputy, newspaperman, and professor drive to the forest. Chris brings the materials to the sheriff and a train of big cars rumbles into the forest.
In the thrilling climax, Sheriff Agar reveals his plan: to lure the monster with a decoy made to look like Nurse Joan (earlier she had referred to Darlene as being in mannequin-like shock).
However, the monster attacks Chris and Judy in his car, chasing them through the woods toward the middle-aged men. They are fast enough to avoid it, and it notices the Joan-like mannequin, attacking it.
Cleverly, Sheriff Agar has rigged his finacee’s replica with explosives, so he blows the monster up.
Sheriff Agar asks the real Joan, “You all right, Honey?”
“Yeah, except for my favorite uniform being blown to pieces.”
“I’ll buy you all the uniforms you want.”
Sheriff Agar kisses the (younger) Joan and the film dissolves to clips of each actor, several of them on the telephone, with their names superimposed.
The End
While the film uses plot elements that had been used in films such as The Blob (1958), The Creeping Terror (1964), Monster-A-Go-Go (1965), (Attack of) The Eye Creatures (1967), and others, Night Fright examines changing attitudes toward authority in the 1960s. While a 1950s creature feature would have teenagers complaining that the adults wouldn't let them do anything, there would be no indication that the adults' authority was illegitimate. By 1967, Bowers calls the sheriff "fuzz" and nearly gets punched; he and his cohorts don't appear to view the sheriff's authority as legitimate in the least. Night Fright was released one year before Night of the Living Dead (1968), which would cement the questioning of traditional authority figures as a key concept of the modern horror film.
After editing Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966), James A. Sullivan would direct three films: Night Fright (1968), the G-rated Western comedy Fairplay (1971), and something called The Pickle Goes in the Middle (1973). It is tragic he did not stay with the horror genre, as his directorial style is quite distinctive, defined by two elements: quick zooms that would make British film directors blush, and transitions between women screaming and other loud noises (mostly women laughing). Clearly, James A. Sullivan had something to say about authoritarianism, but circumstances prevented him from fully developing his philosophy. It is fortunate others such as George A. Romero picked up that gauntlet and ran with it.