History Film / TheNightFlier

* BloodMagic: Dees visits the grave of one of the vampire's latest victims at night time, then cuts open his thumb to smear a bit of blood on the tombstone, allowing him to see where the Night Flier is going. This warlock routine sorta comes out of nowhere, as Dees was shown as nothing but a cynic of the supernatural before.

* GoingForTheBigScoop: Richard Dees is a scummy tabloid report who continues to investigate a series of murders at country airports even when it seems increasingly likely that the killer is a monster of some sort. [[spoiler:The vampire finally murders him after noting that coming face to face with a real monster is the culmination of Dees's existence.]]

* SpoilerCover: Seeing how it's on[[http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/horrormovies/images/0/0c/The_Night_Flier.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20150901032817 the front cover]], TheReveal of Dwight's face hardly comes as a surprise to anyone but [[spoiler:Dees]].

* AnAxeToGrind: Dees uses an axe to defend himself from a horde of zombies. [[spoiler:This eventually turns out to be a hallucination, implicating Dees for the vampire's crimes because he's been hacking up his victims just before the police arrived.]]

** Richard's boss Merton Morrison takes it up a notch. He's the sleazy editor of the paranormal tabloid magazine ''Inside View'', and has even less standards than Dwight about what to print or investigate. At one point he loudly declares that he hopes the killer takes more victims, because it will make for a better story.

* ShoutOut: Dwight Renfield is noted in-universe to be an obvious allusion to TheRenfield character from the original ''Literature/{{Dracula}}''. Also, *Dwight* Frye is the name of the actor who portrayed Renfield in the [[Dracula1931 Universal horror movie]].

* ShoutOut: Dwight Renfield is noted in-universe to be an obvious allusion to TheRenfield character from the original ''Literature/{{Dracula}}''.

* IntrepidReporter: Richard Dees uses a lot of dirty tactics to get his story, often breaking laws to investigate crime scenes and isn't above screwing his colleagues over. His only interest throughout the movie is to get his name on a front page item again.

* AngryGuardDog: After Dees investigates a murder site, he's menaced by an angry black dog before it seems to teleport back to the spot where it was sitting, implying that it's the vampire in disguise.

* TorturedMonster: Dwight is a monstrous vampire who goes around with his small aeroplane to remote airports to butcher everyone there and satiate his hunger. At the end he emotes this trope with a mere look since after leaving the building he stops, morphs back from the feral creature of nightmares to the human face he once was, and shows nothing but sadness and remorse for what he has become.

* WasOnceAMan: Dees finds a photo album in the vampire Dwight's plane that shows how he too was once a man before he became the stuff of nightmares.

* DissonantSerenity: One of the vampire's victims, an elderly woman, is brainwashed into a girlish infatuation with him. She calmly sits on the front porch of her house as her husband is murdered in front of her, then walks back inside and waits for the vampire to devour her too.

* IntrepidReporter: Dees uses a lot of dirty tactics to get his story.

* SympathyForTheHero: The vampire Dwight Renfield has some respect for Richard Dees, the reporter who's investigating his feedings. He sees him as something of a kindred spirit, and goes out of his way to get him to stop pursuing him so he doesn't have to kill him.

* UnscrupulousHero: Richard Dees is a very world-weary sort who will screw over his colleagues to get ahead and is an ass to everyone in general. He often breaks laws to investigate crime scenes to document all the death and slaughter just to get a front page scoop.

Richard Dees is the lead reporter for a low-fodder conspiracy and urban legend-newspaper called the ''Inside View''. After years of investigating bloody crime scenes, Dees has become particularely burned out with his job. When reports of a mysterious killer called the "Night Flier" start circulating, who travels from airport to airport to slaughter everyone present, Dees goes out to investigate--finding far more than he bargained for.

[[quoteright:300:http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/night-flier-poster_1950.jpg]]

* EvenEvilHasLovedOnes: When Dees investigates Dwight Renfield's plane near the end, he looks through a photo album that Dwight has still kept all these years. It contains a picture of Dwight's long-dead wife, hinting that he still has some affection for her.

* IntrepidReporter: Dees uses a lot of dirty tactics to get his story

* BloodMagic: Dees visits the grave of one of the vampire's latest victims at night time, then cuts open his thumb to smear a bit of blood on the tombstone, allowing him to see where the Night Flier is going.

''The Night Flier'' is a 1997 horror film based on Creator/StephenKing’s short story by the same name, which was published as part of the ''Literature/NightmaresAndDreamscapes'' collection. It starred Miguel Ferrer in the lead.

''The Night Flier'' is a 1997 horror film based on Creator/StephenKing’s short story ''The Night Flier'', which was published as part of the ''Literature/NightmaresAndDreamscapes'' collection. It starred Miguel Ferrer in the lead.