sort of borderline homoerotic but not in the sense that it was creepy." For the scene in which Jerry pulls down the window shade and it looks as though Billy is about to perform oral sex on him, Stark remembered, "I'm cleaning his hand and [Tom Holland] said, 'No, get down on your knees.' 'Okay, Tom.' Then when I saw [the film], I thought, 'Oooooh, okay.'" McDowall also did a lot of work on his character, and made a conscious decision to pattern his performance after the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. "My part is that of an old ham actor, I mean a dreadful actor. He realizes it but doesn't admit it. He had a moderate success in an isolated film here and there, but all very bad product. This poor sonofabitch just played the same character all the time, which was awful. And then he disappeared from sight, 15 years beforehand. He's been peddling these movies to late night TV, various syndicated markets – he'd go six months in Iowa, six months in Podunk." McDowall commented to Fangoria, "He's got such a sad life, he's sort of cowardly and then he finds his strength as a human being." Despite the pathetic character he was portraying, McDowall was a pillar for the cast and crew. "He was a kind of Yoda on the set", commented Sarandon. Recalled Ragsdale, "He had his videocamera on his shoulder and he was shooting, like, family movies the whole time." Sarandon recalled that Holland collaborated with choreographer Dorain Grusman in shooting a disco dance scene to have Bearse's character physically changing so that "she goes from this rather dewey, innocent-looking girl to this femme fatale; she kind of grows up right before your eyes." The scene also established Amy discovering Jerry actually was a vampire. Filming Principal photography commenced on December 3, 1984, and wrapped on February 23, 1985. At the time of production, Fright Night was Columbia's lowest-budgeted film and they did not have high expectations for it, so they were focusing all of their attention on the John Travolta/Jamie Lee Curtis film Perfect, which they were certain was going to be a blockbuster. "They never even came to the set", Holland said. "I was left alone. It was totally my film without studio interference." Generally, filming went off without a hitch, but a few mishaps did occur, including an incident