I’m just so happy right now…
I don’t know how younger generations interact with horror movies (I’m 38 as of this writing), but a huge attraction for people of my age is the elusive “so bad it’s good” viewing experience. It probably has something to do with the rare times we would stumble upon something truly bizarre from our local video store. Mine was called Movie Time, by the way (Blockbuster doesn’t really count – that’s the sterile, corporate, late-generation version of the legit movie rental joints). Well before most of us knew about the internet, much less had access to it, we had to rely on the most enticing VHS cover art to decide which movie was worth our 90 minutes. Often, the art was far more interesting than the mediocre film it purported to represent, but occasionally you would find some misguided auteur’s unfiltered vision. Budgets were much lower back then, so creators tended to have more free reign on what they put out. While that rarely led to better quality, it absolutely delivered more interesting movies, and crucially, movies with a real sense of unpredictability. Night of the Demons fits the “so bad it’s good” bill to a tee. It’s surely a touch more self-aware than standard-bearers of the genre (Troll 2, Plan 9 From Outer Space), but not so much that it can be confused for parody.
I’ll dive into the actual plot in a minute, but I really want to illustrate what I’m talking about. The most famous scene in the movie, the only one I was vaguely aware of before watching it, involves a possessed teenage girl (read: 30-year-old scream queen, Linnea Quigley) sitting in the corner of a room, by herself, drawing a lipstick heart on her face. She then, apropos of nothing, proceeds to stick the lipstick into her nipple, swallowing it up completely. It’s absurdly esoteric, the type of thing that you would never see in a modern, focus-grouped movie with an army of writers. None of the other characters are there to witness the act, so it can’t be explained as trying to freak them out. I’m fascinated by how it even made it into the movie… was it in the script? If so, what was the additional context that didn’t make it onto the screen? Was it something the director just came up with on set? It clearly required the FX team to construct a fake breast, fake lipstick or both, so it couldn’t have been ad libbed. Did anybody on set ask why this was happening? It makes no sense, but I’ll never forget that I watched it, and that pretty much sums up the appeal of this type of movie.
Our chief characters are a gang of teenagers who are skipping out on the school Halloween dance to throw a party in an abandoned morgue. It’s the type of group that only exists in movies like this, where every archetype needs to be represented but there’s no way that that these kids would actually hang out together in real life. Once they reach their spooky destination they decide to perform a séance, which naturally summons a demon spirit that starts possessing them, one by one. From that point forward, it’s a numbers game, as more and more of the teens turn into grotesque demon-spawn and stalk the survivors. The plot feels more than a little inspired by The Evil Dead, and luckily Night of the Demons borrows a bit of that films nastiness, as well. There is a lot of mayhem, gore, and some nice scares. Particularly effective is the way that director Kevin Tenney will frame a shot with a big obvious empty space where you expect a demon to pop into view. Sometimes they do, sometimes not, but it’s a cool, stylistic way to generate tension.
I’ll go ahead and admit it, I’m completely in the bag for this movie. It’s not a success by most common metrics: The acting is uniformly bad (except for Amelia Kincade, gamely playing the party organizer/boss demon); the pacing is kind of weird; the story is derivative. I pretty much loved everything about it though. From the creepy animated intro, to the stilted dialogue, to the absolutely fantastic bookending sequences involving a miserable old man who hands out apples with razor blades to trick-or-treaters, it was all great. It admittedly takes a while to really get going, but I immediately knew that this was going to be my type of movie and enjoyed even the early scenes of set up and exposition. It will definitely join NoES 3 and Its the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown as required viewing for me every Halloween season.
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