My Best Friend Is a Vampire

Jeremy Capello is hardly the person you'd expect to become one of the undead.

Played by Robert Sean Leonard, Jeremy is an awkward high-school student with a crush on Darla Blake and very little idea what to do about it.

Then his supermarket delivery job takes him to the home of the mysterious Nora.

One encounter later, Jeremy wakes up to discover that something isn't quite right.

Garlic suddenly isn't his friend.

Mirrors have become problematic.

And there are those two little marks on his neck.

Jeremy has become a vampire.

But My Best Friend Is a Vampire isn't particularly interested in turning Jeremy into a terrifying creature of the night. Instead, becoming a vampire is treated almost like another awkward stage of adolescence.

Luckily, Jeremy isn't left to figure everything out himself.

Enter Modoc.

René Auberjonois plays Modoc, the experienced vampire who arrives to explain Jeremy's new existence.

And he's brilliant.

Rather than appearing as some sinister ancient bloodsucker, Modoc effectively becomes Jeremy's vampire guidance counsellor.

He explains the rules, reassures him that his life isn't over and introduces him to a rather more civilised version of vampirism.

Jeremy doesn't need to murder innocent people to survive.

There are alternatives.

Including pig's blood.

The film's approach to vampirism is one of its funniest ideas. Being undead isn't necessarily a curse — it's simply another way of living that Jeremy needs to understand.

It's basically a supernatural coming-of-age story where the puberty talk has been replaced by a vampire explaining where to buy blood.

Only in the 80s.

While Jeremy is learning how to live as a vampire, Professor Leopold McCarthy is hunting them.

Played with exactly the right amount of madness by David Warner, McCarthy is convinced vampires are a threat that must be destroyed.

He's accompanied by his assistant Grimsdyke, played by Paul Willson.

There's just one problem.

They've got the wrong teenager.

Instead of identifying Jeremy as the vampire, the pair become convinced that Jeremy's best friend Ralph is the creature they're looking for.

It's a simple misunderstanding that gives the movie much of its comedy, particularly as Jeremy desperately tries to understand his own transformation while simultaneously preventing a pair of increasingly enthusiastic vampire hunters from killing his completely human friend.

David Warner clearly understood what sort of film he was making.

McCarthy isn't a subtle character, and the movie is much better for it.

One of the most interesting things about revisiting My Best Friend Is a Vampire today is seeing a very young Robert Sean Leonard.

Just a couple of years later, Leonard would appear as Neil Perry in Dead Poets Society alongside Robin Williams.

Decades later, television audiences would know him as Dr James Wilson in House.

Here, however, he's an awkward teenage vampire trying to work out whether his new condition is going to completely destroy his chances with Darla.

Leonard plays Jeremy surprisingly straight.

That's important because the world around him is ridiculous.

Rather than constantly trying to deliver jokes, Jeremy reacts to the insanity like a teenager whose life has suddenly become extremely complicated.

It gives the movie a likeable centre.

Here's one for the "I didn't realise they were in this" collection.

Kathy Bates appears as Helen Blake, Darla's mother.

This was several years before her terrifying, Oscar-winning performance as Annie Wilkes in Misery turned her into one of Hollywood's most recognisable actresses.

Her role here isn't huge, but spotting future stars in small parts is half the fun of revisiting forgotten 80s movies.

And My Best Friend Is a Vampire has another interesting connection.

Cecilia Peck, who plays Nora, is the daughter of Hollywood legend Gregory Peck.

Take away the vampires for a moment and My Best Friend Is a Vampire is still unmistakably an 80s teen movie.

The clothes.

The hairstyles.

The high-school setting.

The cars.

The music.

The awkward teenage romance.

It belongs to that wonderful period when filmmakers realised almost any concept could be turned into a teenage comedy simply by dropping a supernatural problem into suburban America.

Teenager becomes a werewolf?

Make Teen Wolf.

Teenager dates a vampire?

Make Once Bitten.

Teenager becomes a vampire?

You get My Best Friend Is a Vampire.

There was no need for an enormous cinematic universe or ten sequels planned before the first movie had reached cinemas.

You had an idea.

You made a movie.

Sometimes that was enough.

Perhaps the most charming thing about the film is how completely uninterested it is in presenting vampires as inherently evil.

Jeremy doesn't suddenly become a murderer.

Modoc isn't secretly manipulating him.

Vampires simply exist.

They have adapted.

They've found ways to survive without attacking people, and they'd mostly prefer to be left alone.

The real danger comes from people who have already decided what vampires must be.

For a lightweight 80s teen comedy, there's actually a surprisingly decent idea hiding underneath all the jokes.

Jeremy isn't learning how to defeat vampirism.

He's learning how to live with it.

No forgotten 80s teen comedy would be complete without music reminding you exactly which decade you're watching.

The film makes memorable use of Timbuk 3's "The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades", immediately planting it in the mid-to-late 1980s.

And that's part of the pleasure of watching something like My Best Friend Is a Vampire today.

These films have accidentally become time capsules.

What once looked completely ordinary — the bedrooms, clothes, cars, shops and hairstyles — now provides almost as much entertainment as the story itself.

Nobody making the film could have known that decades later we'd be staring at the background thinking:

"I remember those."

My Best Friend Is a Vampire wasn't alone.

The second half of the 1980s gave us an extraordinary collection of vampire films.

Fright Night arrived in 1985.

Once Bitten followed the same year.

Then 1987 gave us both The Lost Boys and Near Dark.

Each approached vampire mythology differently.

Near Dark was brutal.

The Lost Boys was cool.

Fright Night combined genuine horror with comedy.

Once Bitten went for broad teen comedy.

My Best Friend Is a Vampire sits comfortably at the lighter end of that spectrum.

It isn't trying to frighten you.

It wants you to have fun.

Not every movie from the 1980s became a classic.

Some became something else.

They became VHS movies.

The films you discovered because the cover looked interesting in a video shop.

The ones a friend told you about.

The movies that appeared unexpectedly on television one night and somehow remained stuck in your memory for the next thirty years.

My Best Friend Is a Vampire feels exactly like one of those movies.

It's small.

It's silly.

It's charming.

And it doesn't take itself remotely seriously.

At just 89 minutes, it arrives, tells its ridiculous little vampire story and disappears before the joke wears thin.

There is something wonderfully refreshing about that.

Absolutely — provided you know what you're getting.

Don't come looking for The Lost Boys.

Don't expect the darkness of Near Dark or the scares of Fright Night.

This is an 80s teenage comedy that happens to involve vampires.

And that's precisely why it works.

Robert Sean Leonard makes Jeremy genuinely likeable, René Auberjonois is fantastic as his undead mentor and David Warner enthusiastically throws himself into the role of a vampire hunter who is spectacularly confident about almost everything he gets wrong.

More than anything, though, My Best Friend Is a Vampire captures something we love about 1980s cinema.

It isn't embarrassed by its premise.

A teenager becomes a vampire.

His best friend gets hunted by mistake.

His new vampire mentor teaches him how to survive.

That's the movie.

And sometimes you really don't need anything more complicated than that.

Nearly forty years later, this forgotten little vampire comedy still has plenty of bite.