13 Nights of Shockotber: The Night Flier

by A. J.

This is my favorite time of year, second only to Christmas. Autumn has arrived, the weather is cooling down, and October becomes the month-long celebration of scary movies called Shocktober. There are a lot of horror movies out there, but as a genre, horror is still looked down upon by some mainstream critics and moviegoers. It doesn’t help that, admittedly, there are so few quality horror movies made but, like comedy, it’s a very difficult and subjective genre. So, in the days leading up Halloween I’ll be posting some recommendations for scary movies to help you celebrate Shocktober.

Night 6: Death From Above: The Night Flier

The Night Flier is a little seen adaptation of a Stephen King short story published in the collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes. It was shot for a theatrical release, but premiered on HBO in 1997, before receiving a short-lived run in theaters, giving it the stigma of a made-for-cable movie which in this case is undeserved. The Night Flier is a good, solid, and scary movie with a fresh take on the most classic of movie monsters: the vampire.

Miguel Ferrer plays Richard Dees, a cynical and bitter star reporter for a supermarket tabloid called Inside View. He’s made his name covering gruesome stories and getting equally gruesome photographs, which he likely fakes. He is assigned to investigate a series of vampire-like murders that are linked to a serial killer that flies into rural airports at night. Dees is also assigned by his editor to mentor a new reporter named Katherine who is helping him with the story, which he hates and resents to say the least. Dees is also a pilot so he flies into the same airports as the “Night Flier” to question the locals and get pictures of the corpses at the morgue. The neck wound on the victims is not the traditional two small red dots of other vampire movies. This wound is a large single hole, like a railroad spike stabbed into the neck.

Despite how harsh he is towards her, Katherine still want to help Dees track down the "Night Flier." She’s looking for her big break and sees this as an opportunity. Dees finds himself just a step behind the killer. He finds a mysterious black soil on the runway of an airport where the black airplane was recently seen. The movie shows us scenes of the mysterious caped pilot with victims he seems to have cast a spell over. The mystery element of this story is the big driving force behind the movie. Though Dees remains a mostly unsympathetic character we stay with him because we want to know the answer to the mystery of the "Night Flier." Horror is probably the only genre where you can spend so much time with an unlikeable character since a supernatural or ironic comeuppance is probably in order for them. It also helps that Miguel Ferrer is great in the role of Dees. He plays the character with a bitter contempt that feels real and never goes over the top.

The Night Flier is a movie that never quite does what you expect. When Dees finally tracks down the “Night Flier,” their confrontation is unexpectedly understated, but creepy and tense. The climax that follows is a chilling psychological freak-out. This movie plays with the cliché image of the vampire as a charismatic figure in a cape, then gives us the most grotesquely monstrous vampire ever put on film. There is a healthy amount of blood and gore, but it is not excessive, so this is a good movie for a squeamish person that wants to see how much they can stand. All of this makes The Night Flier an entertaining, under-the-radar horror film that can be hard to find but is definitely worth tracking down.