Night Of The Demons (1988) is a really fun film. Set on Halloween night, Night Of The Demons is great seasonal watch that has become something of an annual tradition for many, many cinephiles around Halloween. It’s not a great film on a technical or formal aesthetic level, but it does possess a certain greatness in the amount of its unadulterated enjoyment. And it is not the superficial enjoyment or pleasure one finds in a superhero movie or a Lucas/Spielberg picture that tries so hard to placate and comfort viewers, but a craftily made, wholly committed endeavor that wants nothing more than to connect with fans of the horror genre.
As is the case with most horror films from the eighties Night Of The Demons matches every scare with a moment of sleaze. Though it isn’t often discussed in public forums, this pairing of horror and sleaze is what makes older horror films such fetish objects for fans and cinephiles alike. American horror movies today tend to shy away from the gratuitous misogyny of films like Night Of The Demons for good reasons. But in doing so, films like Night Of The Demons have been transformed into singular novelties.
The plot of Night Of The Demons is wonderfully simple: a group of teenagers have a Halloween party in a haunted house and are possessed or terrorized by demonic spirits. Night Of The Demons is often compared to The Evil Dead (1981) because it shares a kind of low budget ingenuity and humor with that film. But even more than that, both Night Of The Demons and The Evil Dead are horror films that realize that a good or effective horror picture need not be complex. These two films reduce the genre to its very essence, taking cues from the B-movies of Roger Corman and Jack Hill rather than Romero, Argento, or De Palma.
What’s really brilliant about Night Of The Demons is that it takes this pure and simple approach to horror and injects it into the pastel colored world of teenaged angst that was the bread and butter of John Hughes. Each character in Night Of The Demons is an archetype that has been shaded and molded in the image of a John Hughes comedy. Then, in the haunted house, the filmmakers unleash absolute carnage with plenty of gore, nudity, and coarse language. This stratagem was exactly what youthful horror fans in the eighties wanted. Night Of The Demons became a kind of catharsis for the demented young cinephile who wanted nothing more than to see the “normies” of John Hughes films (and their fans) decimated by campy demons.
Night Of The Demons is really campy too. It takes a lot of its cues from the horror comedy The Return Of The Living Dead (1985); straddling the line between over the top mayhem and nutso goofiness. Night Of The Demons is a film predicated on the understanding that once a film introduces a concept as bizarre as demonic possession, all bets are off when it comes to realism. This is a film that isn’t afraid to go just a little too far for a laugh or a gasp, reveling in the command that even the most rudimentary horror film has over the spectator’s emotions.
The one obvious thing that Night Of The Demons takes from Romero is the confidence to have a Black main character who doesn’t die. There are a number of accounts from the production of Night Of The Demons regarding a subplot about a gay couple and the inclusion of an interracial kiss that were all abandoned for fear of making the film unmarketable. What survives in the film is but a pale shadow of what could have been, but its existence at all is not unremarkable and is likely one of the reasons the film has endured.
