Children of the Night is a 1991 horror film directed by Tony Randel, starring Karen Black, Peter DeLuise, Ami Dolenz, and Garrett Morris.
Two friends accidentally awaken an ancient vampire, who proceeds to turn most of the nearby town into bloodsuckers. A priest and a schoolteacher team up with the last remaining humans in town to stop the terror.
This film contains examples of:
- And I Must Scream: Czakyr keeps the children he killed alive so he can feed on them. They've been like this since the late 1930s.
- Big Bad: Czakyr, head vampire of Allburg.
- Familiar: Czakyr manifests one in the form of a roughly 10-year-old boy. He's made of Czakyr's desires, and is a total perv.
- Devoured by the Horde: Cindy frees Czakyr's child victims kept in the crypt, and they swarm him and try to do this to him. He's able to overpower them and escape, but points for effort.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: Taking his preferred targets into the equation, Czakyr does give off a rather pedophile vibe. What happens to the victims he apprehends doesn't lessen that either.
- The Fundamentalist: We first see Mark tutoring a young girl whose mother is convinced that Paradise Lost is "blasphemous."
- Heroic Willpower: Finding life as a vampire to be miserable, Cindy hates Czakyr and comes up with a plan for her and Lucy to kill him.
- Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Czakyr, by a giant cross attached to a truck, no less.
- Kick the Dog: Czakyr murdering a bunch of children when the town nearly catches onto him. Turns out he actually did worse by keeping the kids alive and conscious for decades to feed off of.
- Made of Plasticine: At one point Mark manages to remove a vampire's entire face with one swing of a 2x4.
- Precision F-Strike: Delivered hilariously by Mark to a vampire.Mark: Let her go, you big, dumb, ugly FUCK!
- Our Vampires Are Different: These ones sleep in water with their lungs coming out of their mouths or in cocoons. Also, killing Czakyr not only makes them human again, but brings back the ones who had been staked, who end up having no memory of ever being turned.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: Czakyr was trapped in a church crypt — which had since been flooded — until soon after the start of the film.
- Secondary Character Title: The children Czakyr keeps to feed on.
- Suspiciously Specific Denial: Hillary denies that Karen and Cindy are vampires and calls it "silly" without Mark mentioning it, indicating that she has been vamped herself.
- Town with a Dark Secret: An ancient vampire turning a small country town.
- Virgin Power: Apparently virgin blood is "pure," and thus delicious to vamps.
- The X of Y
