THE NIGHT FLIER

A mysterious man flies over American skies in a small airplane, landing at night in small airports lost in the desert and brutally kills, draining the blood of anyone who gets in his way. A magazine specializing in sensationalist events and various voyeurism tasks two reporters to hunt down this mysterious killer to discover his identity and motivations. Competing for the article are an ambitious and tenacious young journalist starting out and an experienced, selfish, and ruthless editor who puts work above everything else. It will apparently be he who wins the challenge and uncovers the mysterious flyer, but he will end up identifying so much with the story that he will die. He will thus achieve his goal (the name and photo on the front page of the newspaper) but not in the way he longed for... "The Night Flier" is one of the best horror films of recent years: rough, brutal, unpleasant, never conciliatory, with selfish characters indifferent to the fate of their fellow men, bearing a spirit of nonconformity that modern genre cinema has inexorably lost. The theme of vampirism is treated here according to a screenplay that does not pretend to realism in its statements but rather focuses on the properly fantastic side of the story, building a story that is not at all credible but concrete and solid in its development. The splatter effects follow at a high level, both in quantity and quality (memorable the image of an old man with his throat slit and his head barely attached to his neck), the pursuit of the ineffable man-demon (whose true face is only revealed at the end) intersects with the progressive loss of rationality of the reporter, the criticism of the lack of boundaries between what is lawful and unlawful that often taints journalism, although not new, is conducted with intelligence, and the final massacre at the airport fully satisfies the canons of pure horror. A small gem this "The Night Flier", the example of the spirit that a true horror should always be imbued with, a violent and anarchic film as rarely made nowadays. The protagonist, effective and sure in his role, is Miguel Ferrer, whom "Twin Peaks" fans will remember (he played the role of the FBI agent Albert Rosenfeld, also there an unpleasant and insufferable character).