Night of the Demons Blu-ray Review
Trick or treat.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, February 3, 2014
Autumn brings us a holiday often associated with ghouls and other evil entities, and so it's perhaps appropriate to quote
notorious occultist Aleister Crowley, once called "the wickedest man in the world", and one who famously opined that
"spelling is defunct" in his supposedly prophetic treatise
The Book of the Law. That may be one reason so many
people spell the October festal day Halloween, rather than Hallowe'en, as (with so many ancient days of celebration
and/or remembrance), the vestigial remnants of what the days actually
mean fall away and we are left with
modern day counterfeits, whether that be nonstop advertising and consumerism or, in this particular case, rampant
dressing up and candy consumption. (I joke about Crowley, of course, as that sentiment quoted above is widely
thought to refer more to magical—or magickal—pronouncements than to actual colloquially understood spelling.) That
"e'en" is all important, however, to understanding some of the roots of the holiday, for the
really important thing,
at least for Christians, is actually the
next day, All Saints' Day, which actually leads on to a second observation
called All Souls' Day. Much as the ancient rites of the solstice and Saturnalia have become subsumed by the subsequent
Christian celebrations surrounding Jesus' birth (which even the orneriest bible scholar will probably admit almost
certainly didn't take place in the winter), our current Halloween festivities have little relation to their atavistic roots. But
that doesn't stop horror films from exploiting some of the primal fears that still lurk menacingly just beneath the trick or
treating, dressing up and even occasional egg throwing.
Night of the Demons was initially supposed to be titled
Halloween Party, until the makers of the
Halloween films threatened legal action for supposedly infringing on their franchise (a lawsuit I personally
think would have ultimately gone nowhere, but I digress). The team behind
Night of the Demons didn't want a
conflict, since they were already operating on a fairly paltry budget, and so a somewhat less specific—and yet oddly
more accurate—title was selected for this film, which has gone on to become something of a cult item, spawning not just
a drove of imitators but also a
sequel (as well as another sequel not available on Blu-ray) and a
remake.
Kevin Tenney made a relatively auspicious debut with
Witchboard, and though according to the in-depth featurette included on this Blu-ray as a supplement he
wasn't the first choice
to
be this film's director, once he came on board things fell into place rather quickly. However, there were some conflicts
with writer and
producer
Joe Augustyn, who felt that Tenney's previous association with co-producers Walter Josten and Jeff Geoffray might mean
that Augustyn's
initial
"vision" for the film might not be realized. Ironically, it seems that Tenney and Augustyn got along better than Augustyn
and Geoffray, at
least
according to the same featurette, but this fact then begs the question of who is responsible for what is regularly cited as
one of the
strangest
things about this supposed "horror" film: virtually
half of the film's hour and a half running time is spent in
establishing the setup,
with
no real violence or ostensible scares to be found in the film's first 45 minutes or so. What makes this such a salient
question is that many
critics
found Tenney's
Witchboard (which Tenney also wrote) similarly slow out of the starting gate.
Unlike the 2009 remake of
Night of the Demons, the original film doesn't really waste much time setting up the
backstory of a haunted
mansion, and instead merely starts to assemble the various characters who have decided to spend Halloween at an
abandoned mortuary
called Hull House, after having been invited by a weird girl named Angela (Mimi Kinkaid, who later slightly changed her
name to Amelia
Kinkaid). Among the kids who decide to attend the festivities is Judy (Cathy Podewell), who dresses up as Alice in
Wonderland. (There's
some interesting background about this choice in the making of featurette on the Blu-ray.) Judy is actually not all that
thrilled to be going,
but her boyfriend Jay (Lance Fenton), who actually received an official invitation, urges her to join him and she ultimately
gives in.
It's only once Jay and Judy arrive at Hull House with a gaggle of other kids that one of them recounts a brief history of
the place (which is
decidedly different than that posited in the remake). Suffice it to say Hull House has a
colorful history and is
rumored to be
possessed by evil spirits. Whether that has anything to do with a number of weird anomalies that almost instantly crop
up—candles not
staying lit, a radio suddenly dying—is left to the increasingly worried imaginations of some of the party's participants. At
this point Angela,
wanting to save the party from a similar death, decides to hold a séance, and that's when all hell (or at least a part of it)
breaks loose.
As relatively restrained as the first half or so of
Night of the Demons is, it's more than matched by the bat
guano hysteria that makes up the second half of the film. It's actually pointless to go into much detail on the
various characters, for first of all, they exist mostly as stereotypes anyway (aside from the film's laudable inclusion of
minorities, which Tenney discusses as having lessened their SAG salary requirements), and more importantly, they don't
exist very long once the mayhem starts breaking out. The film delights in a series of incredibly gruesome deaths as a
malevolent spirit infects more and more of the participants. The film either intentionally or unintentionally tips its hat to
zombie films in a way, for the victims of the violence here turn into shambling ghouls themselves, with the goal to simply
take out the remaining humans.
The commentary tracks and making of featurette want to make a case here for how innovative
Night of the
Demons is, but less personally involved folks may differ with that assessment. The film does part ways from its
eighties slasher kin in not getting into the blood and guts from the first moment, but the basic setup of a bunch of crazy
teens in a haunted house can hardly be called fresh. The good news here is that the film has a sense of humor—albeit
an awfully
gooey one—and Tenney stages the various deaths with a fair degree of relish (and/or ketchup). The
film may be just another example of how deep rooted religious expressions of yore have devolved into mere terror, but
that doesn't necessarily mean there isn't a fair amount of fun to be had.
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