Memorable Movie Metamorphoses

Wired recently posted a list of their coolest movie metamorphoses, which is a pretty solid list, especially David Cronenberg's The Fly and American Werewolf In London. However, Smeagol's transformation into Gollum in the beginning of The Return Of The King should have made the list, and I thought there was one other glaring omission from a movie that many of you may have forgotten.

Fright Night was an entertaining horror comedy aimed squarely at teens, and the movie holds up fairly well, even now that I'm *ahem!* just a wee bit older. Roddy McDowall is priceless at Peter Vincent, an actor who's made a career playing fearless vampire killers in B-movies, but when he's forced to slay an actual vampire in real life he gets much more than he bargained for.

He's attacked by a character nicknamed Evil Ed, a horror movie geek who's the pathetic yet sympathetic best friend of the main character, Charlie Brewster. Evil Ed has been an outcast his entire life, so he becomes seduced by the power that being a vampire brings him.

He takes the form of a wolf, gets a stake through the heart courtesy of Peter Vincent, and the resulting transformation is one of the most memorable sequences in horror movie history.



Up until this point, Fright Night had been a fairly light-hearted, entertaining, and spooky flick, so I wasn't expecting such a poignant death scene, especially after the character had ostensibly become a villain. Top marks to the makeup and sound effects teams, the composer, both the actors involved, and the director for injecting so much unexpected pathos into a genre flick targeted at teenagers. Even watching this scene out of context via YouTube, it gave me chills.