One Demonic Night

Leave a comment

I only discovered after watching Night of the Demons (2009) that it was a remake.  Eventually curiosity got the best of me and I had a spare moment to watch the 1988 original.  It’s still kind of a bad movie, but it is scarier than the remake.  It’s also a horror comedy, but the emphasis is a bit more on the horror here.  A group of ten high schoolers go to Hull House, which used to be a funeral home, for a Halloween party.  When the power goes out they decide to have a séance.  Unbeknownst to them, however, there is a real resident demon.  This demon gets passed on through kissing, and it animates the kids who’ve been killed along the way.  Although the final girl is pretty clear from the beginning, in a usual twist the only surviving guy is African-American, the son of a preacher.

The concept of demons here is explained as entities that were never human.  This is the explanation Ed and Lorraine Warren used, often without making reference to fallen angels.  Since the demons are using the physical bodies of the kids, they can be stopped by locked doors, but killing them doesn’t really help, since they keep coming back.  It seems that there’s really just one actual demon, a dragon-headed entity that lives in the crematorium.  Rodger, the Black man, brings the element of religion to the story.  He objects to the séance in the first place, and suggests that they pray as he and Judy, the final girl, are attempting to escape.

In-between all this is sandwiched the gore and violence that make it pretty typical horror.  The humor involved, however, makes it less intense than a typical slasher.  Although I didn’t walk away thinking this would be a favorite movie, I could see why it’s garnered a cult following.  As is often the case, the original is better than the remake.  For one thing, it understands that religion seasons horror quite well.  Demons are, by definition, religious monsters, at least traditionally.  And the two “good kids” who survive are uncomfortable with messing with spiritual forces to begin with.  Judy just wants to go to the dance, after all.  The movie went on into sequels as its cult fandom grew.  If I ever do a sequel to Nightmares with the Bible I’ll need to include this franchise, I guess.  For a sleepy weekend afternoon, there are worse bad movies to watch.

Demonic Night

1 Comment

There’s a type of film—I don’t have the vocabulary for it—where the action is loud, brash, and in-your-face.  Colors are often lurid and, in horror, gross sounds are emphasized.  I’m not sure what it’s called, but it’s the style used with Night of the Demons.  I didn’t realize until after I’d seen it that it was a remake of an earlier film by the same name.  The one I saw was the 2009 version.  I’d just finished a book about demons, and I was looking over Amazon Prime and what I could watch without spending any more money.  Well, I did learn something.  But first, a little plot reveal: a group of friends are going to a Halloween party in a haunted mansion.  Mainly they’re looking for controlled substances and uninhibited sex.  The party hostess has rented said haunted mansion for the night.

Once they get there the final girl, Maddie (and you can tell from the beginning that she’ll be the final girl) starts to realize that there seem to be supernatural forces at play.  The cops show up and break up the rave, but seven kids remain behind since they’ve been locked in.  They find a hidden room where the bodies of six previous victims have decomposed.  This leads to the possession of the woman hosting the group and these demons are transferred either by bite or sex—they are sexually transmitted demons.  So, naturally, all the friends except the final girl fall victim.  These demons dissolve in the sunlight unless they get seven victims, so when Maddie makes it through Halloween night, the demons are defeated.

What makes this moving interesting is the type of demons on show.  These seven demons are so bad that they’ve been kicked out of Hell—they don’t follow the rules.  This made me think.  Logically, no demons in Hell follow the rules.  The root of the word “pandemonium” means “all demons.”  If none of them obey rules, how can any be kicked out for breaking rules?  Laws and rules are what preserve any civilization.  Those who use their money and power to flaunt the law are, in their own way, demonic.  These demons are kept at bay by spells written on the walls of one room in the house.  Those rules they must obey.  Is this a parable about free will?  It doesn’t seem sophisticated enough for that.  Night of the Demons is one of those fast, loud, lurid movies that need a monster.  Demons, which have no basic form, seem to be purpose made to fill such gaps.