In 1997's The Night Flier a Vampire Flies Around in a Plane? What? That Can't Be Right

You know who's great? Miguel Ferrer. He is great in this, unsurprisingly, in a rare lead role.

I started writing for The A.V. Club when I was a twenty-one-year-old college student in 1997. That seems like a lifetime ago because it was a lifetime ago. Holy fuck am I old. I’ve been writing professionally for well over half my life.

I was just a kid when I started. I was in a terrible hurry to make something of myself. I needed to prove to the hateful voice inside my head that I had value as a human being and was not doomed to failure.

When I started, The Onion was in a transitional phase. Under Ben Karlin's leadership, it had successfully pivoted from a black-and-white parody of supermarket tabloids read mainly by stoned Wisconsin college students to satirizing USA Today and, by extension, contemporary American life in all its gleeful insanity for a national, if not international audience.

Tabloids are both an inviting and tricky target for satire since they already exist on the knife’s edge of parody. It’s hard to make fun of something that’s already a joke. Furthermore, the Weekly World News has already spoofed tabloids so effectively that many mistook it for what it was mocking.

When I started writing professionally I was on the direct-to-video beat. That suited me fine because I’ve always gravitated towards trash. I lacked confidence, so the idea that I would be writing about movies that didn’t matter and nobody cared about appealed to me.

I wrote about the 1997 low-budget Stephen King adaptation of The Night Flier at the beginning of my career as a film critic. I’m deeply nostalgic for that time in my life and my career.

I first wrote about The Night Flier when I was a newspaperman. At the start of my career, my editors and I would physically take the paper to the printers on Sunday nights. That’s how old I am. I predate all this digital shit. When I began, it was all analog and all magic.

The Night Flier is about writing, tabloids, and the innate human need to prove yourself and your worth, as much as it is about a bloodsucker who flies in a small plane rather than transforming into a bat.

The low-budget King adaptation is a vehicle for Miguel Ferrer, a Nepo Baby from an auspicious family. Miguel’s father was Academy Award winner Jose, his mother was singer and actress Rosemary Clooney, and his cousin was George Clooney.

Ferrer was a brilliant character actor. He specialized in playing creeps, hustlers, villains, and all-around degenerates. He was often cast a villain but The Night Flier gives him a rare lead role.

The Robocop star more than lives up to the challenge. Hotshot tabloid writer Richard Dees is the protagonist of The Night Flier, but he is anything but a hero. All that matters to this dogged newshound is getting the story. Everything other than that is secondary, if not wholly inconsequential.

Ferrer’s tabloid sleaze is damned good at what he does, in part because he is a pilot with his own plane, which gives him an advantage over rivals who are forced to rely on the whims of airlines.

The Night Flier finds Richard in a professional slump. It’s been months since he’s scored a front-page story. He’s concerned that his future with the paper might be in jeopardy.

Richard nevertheless has enough dignity to turn down a sketchy-seeming story from editor-in-chief Merton Morrison (Dan Monahan) involving a mysterious figure who calls himself Dwight Renfield and is murdering victims at small rural airfields.

The dogged reporter changes his mind when more dead bodies pile up, but the Editor in Chief has given the story to Katherine Blair (Julie Entwisle), an ambitious young writer who is just as unhealthily competitive as her rival.

Richard is coldly pragmatic in his treatment of the younger writer, as in every other facet of his life. When he needs her, he proposes they collaborate and work on the story together. When he no longer requires her journalistic services, he locks her in a closet to beat her in filing the story.

The Night Flier is more than just a movie with Miguel Ferrer; it’s a Miguel Ferrer movie. It’s a vehicle for the popular and prolific character actor’s dark magnetism.

Ferrer is wonderfully comfortable with playing a complete heel. Ferrer doesn’t try to make the character likable. He does not soften his rough edges. He instead plays a seedy opportunist whose commitment to getting the story trumps everything else, particularly morals and ethics.

The Night Flier makes subtext text when the movie’s other primary bad guy, a flying-adept vampire in arch-traditional garb but with a non-traditional way of getting from place to place, tells Richard that they are not so different.

Finally, a movie where the hero and the villain aren’t so different after all! What a twist. Richard is a metaphorical vampire. He’s a professional parasite who makes a grubby living exploiting the pain, degradation, and loss of others.

He has no ethics. He has no morality. He is devoid of empathy and compassion for his fellow man. On a figurative level, Richard does what the Night Flier does literally: suck the life out of his victims and then throw away their husks when he longer has any use for them.

It is very easy to believe that The Night Flier was adapted from a forty-page short story rather than a four-hundred-page novel. There’s not much to the film beyond a vampire who prefers light aircraft to transforming into a bat for flight and a tabloid creep who does not need to live on human blood to qualify as a monster.

The Night Flier is a modest film of modest pleasures and modest rewards. That it works at all is primarily a testament to Miguel Ferrer’s wonderful lead performance. He grounds the silly supernatural action in relatably grubby and dark human emotions. Because of him, and solely because of him, we believe a laughably ridiculous premise.

The filmmakers faced the same challenge as many others in our journey: How do you take the light snack of a brief short story and transform it into the hearty meal of a 90-minute, three-act movie?

The Night Flier does a good job of fleshing out this world by adding a professional rival for the anti-hero to act as his foil, competition, and rival.

King’s hatred of tabloids and exploitation lends the proceedings an element of genuine rage, though he shares with the disreputable press (or rather, even more disreputable press) a taste for the dark side, violence, and depravity.

The Night Flier hit me smack dab in the nostalgic sweet spot. I have immense nostalgia for this era of direct-to-video genre fare. I even have nostalgia for the hideous fashions. Ferrer is so riveting you barely even notice that he wears mom jeans throughout the film. I’m sure they’re comfortable, but they are not flattering.

I don’t want to oversell what is ultimately a very slight film, but it’s satisfying in the same way a short story can be satisfying and in an equally disposable manner.