William Ragsdale Revisits Fright Night at 40 — From the Stage Where His Career Started

William Ragsdale returned Wednesday to the El Dorado, Arkansas stage where he performed as a child to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Fright Night, the masterpiece of '80s horror in which he stars as a teenage boy who correctly suspects his neighbor of being a vampire.

To kick off the El Dorado Film Festival, Ragsdale — who has also appeared in shows including Search Party, Justified, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Herman’s Head — recalled how he went from doing plays in his small southern Arkansas hometown to starring in his first feature film opposite the Oscar-nominated Chris Sarandon and Planet of the Apes icon Roddy McDowall.

He also shared inside stories from a modest horror hit that went on to become a cult classic, highly respected today for still-effective practical effects and an irresistible mix of compelling performances, camp, menace, and serious scares.

And he recalled a moment of real danger when his character, 17-year-old Charley Brewster, rushes down a staircase.

"I was running down the stairs and I slipped, and I thought I sprained my ankle, and so I was hobbling a little bit, and they were gonna wrap it up, and I was gonna try it again," he said in a Q&A with El Dorado Film Festival executive director Alexander Jeffery. "And the sound man came over and said, 'It's not a sprain, it's a break,' because he had heard it on the headphones."

He did the rest of the movie in a soft cast, but told an insurance investigator that he wasn't really slowing down the production. That frustrated a producer, who reminded him every day that his answer had cost the production a payout: "He used to follow me around after that, and he'd say, '$300,000. That's what you cost me a day.' And he did that for like, two weeks."

The film benefitted from the excellent, deliberative work of Boss Film Studios, which visual effects veteran Richard Edlund founded after working for Industrial Light and Magic on films including Raiders of the Lost Ark. One scene in Fright Night recalls the Nazi-melting scene in Raiders — though the Fright Night actually looks better. 

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One of the most memorable effects in Fright Night is a gloriously hideous maw that overtakes the face of Amy (Amanda Bearse) near the end of the film. It was a last-minute addition, to provide a nice jump scare, Ragsdale explained, but visual effects artist Randall William Cook had to create it basically overnight. He was frustrated by the timeline, but Fright Night writer-director Tom Holland assured him it would only be onscreen for a few seconds.

It was so striking that it ended up on the film's poster:

Ragsdale had gone on to other big roles when he learned that Fright Night still had a huge following, decades after its release.

"It wasn't until the 2000s when I got a call from my manager — in 2008 or 2009 or something. He asked if I would go to a convention, like a horror convention. And I said, 'Yeah — why? Why would I?'" Ragsdale laughed.

"And he said, 'Well, the rest of the cast is going to be there.' Chris and I stayed close, but I hadn't really seen anybody else in 20 or 25 years. And I went to it. The first one was in Dallas, and it was a crowd, a huge crowd, and they knew the movie, and I was like, 'Oh — when did this happen? And it happened because of VHS and DVDs."

William Ragsdale on Going From El Dorado to Fright Night

Ragsdale grew up watching movies at El Dorado's Rialto, a Classical Revival theater built in 1929 when El Dorado was a booming oil town. (Oil and chemicals remain economic drivers.) He first took the stage in a third-grade production of Charlotte's Web at West Woods Elementary School, then began to study with a children's theater group at the lovely South Arkansas Arts Center, which recently received an elegant renovation and is the main site of the festival.

When an audience member asked how he'd lost his local accent to appear in Fright Night, he noted that his teachers at the children's theater taught him to speak without it. He recalled that during a production of British drama The Lion in Winter, one teacher, Jim Wilson, advised him, in a thick accent: "You can't talk like that to your daddy, the king."

Ragsdale performed in El Dorado High School productions, winning the Best Thespian Award, and was chosen as the Arkansas state representative for the prestigious National Society of Arts and Letters Drama
competition held in Chicago. He then went on to Arkansas' Hendrix College, whose graduates also include fellow Arkansas native Mary Steenburgen.

But after that, he said Wednesday, he thought he might be done with acting. He considered going into law — his grandfather was a local judge — but his parents urged him to stay with acting.

"I took the LSAT. I was going to go to law school in Little Rock. That was my plan, anyway. And my parents, Bob and Sara, said, 'Why don't you go and try this for a year, you know? Why don't you just give it a shot? You're young. You don't have any responsibilities. And they sort of gifted me as my graduation president a year in California."

He had no Hollywood connections, expect one.

"I had worked with a guest director at Hendrix who was affiliated with an acting school out there [in Los Angeles), and he wrote a letter, and I auditioned for the school. And after my audition, I got a call from the woman who was in charge of admissions there, and she said, 'Are you Sara Ragsdale's son? I said, 'Yeah, why? How do you know that?' And it was my mother's brother's wife's sister who was with the school."

He auditioned for the lead in Peter Bogdanovich's Mask to play the real-life Rocky Dennis, a teenager with a life-threatening facial deformity called "lionitis." The part went to Eric Stoltz, but casting director Jackie Burch remembered Ragsdale. He called her a year later and asked if he could take her to lunch.

"And she said, 'No, but why don't you come read for this new thing I'm doing, this vampire movie that I'm doing?'" Ragsdale recalled.

Fielding audience questions Wednesday night, Ragsdale noted that he wasn't the only one in the Fright Night cast from a small town: Sarandon grew up outside Wheeling, West Virginia. Ragsdale said he wasn't overwhelmed by being in a Hollywood production because he was so young and "didn't know anything."

One thing he learned from his famous co-stars, Sarandon and McDowall, was to stay humble and do the job.

"There was never an instance where we were waiting on those guys — and I have had that experience, waiting on, you know, the big cheese to come in and do the thing. They were just spot on," Ragsdale said. "Staying on the task was a great lesson, and Tom was a real actor's director. He kept you focused on what you needed to be focused on."

Ragsdale said he did make one newbie error: In a scene where he, Bearse and Stephen Geoffreys, who plays Edward "Evil Ed" Thompson, walk down an alley, he saw that they were running out of room and yelled "cut." Ragsdale remembered, amusedly, that Holland was not pleased.

"He blew a gasket," Ragsdale laughed. "He said, 'There's one person on this movie who yells cut, and t's not you.'"

Asked what it was like to be back in his hometown, he reflected: "This is the first time I've been back since my dad passed. So it's very emotional, you know, to come back and see all the places that are indelible in you, and people that you know."

An audience member replied, "We love you and we want you back," to applause from all.

Main image: El Dorado Film Festival executive director Alexander Jeffery and William Ragsdale at the South Arkansas Arts Center screening of Fright Night. MovieMaker.