Horror fiends are living in a golden era. Practically every week, a new creature feature, paranormal thriller, or speculative zombie movie hits theaters. Shudder has become the essential home for indie and international horror, but Netflix, HBO Max, and Hulu have thrown their fair share of millions at the genre, too. It’s quite possible a gory vampire romp and a witchy epic will earn Oscar nominations next year.
Still, I would argue one spooky subgenre remains vastly underserved by today’s filmmakers and studios: polished schlock. “Elevated horror” is great, but sometimes, instead of a Paul Thomas Anderson-like meditation on grief masquerading as a gorefest, you just want to watch a bunch of horny teenagers drink beer, perform a seance, and then get brutally murdered by evil spirits. Blessedly, 1988’s Night of the Demons remains in circulation to fill the void.
Kevin S. Tenney’s follow-up to the Ouija-themed cult fave Witchboard could be mistaken for parody. On Halloween night, a group of high schoolers gather in an abandoned mortuary to party — and accidentally conjure demons from the netherworld. Whoops!!!! Dreams of inebriated hookups turn to nightmares when demons possess resident goth Angela (Amelia Kinkade) and her Barbie-esque best bud Suzanne (Linnea Quigley). The demonic duo proceed to rampage through a cast of stock characters, from a virgin ingénue to a beer-guzzling blunderhead and even a Danny Zuko wannabe straight out of Grease. Nearly everyone will be torn apart by the time the credits roll.
Night of the Demons isn’t an ironic so-bad-its-good, and it isn’t a horror-comedy per se, although I was roaring start to finish after a recent rewatch. In horror, there’s a fine line between giddy gruesomeness and vile exploitation, especially in 1980s movies, when anything that aspired to strong R-rated video-rental numbers had producer-mandated T&A. (Which, it should be said, Tenney very much delivers on, in surprisingly shocking ways.)
Night of the Demons lands on the right side of the line, more Evil Dead than Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare, Ghoulies, or true bottom-of-the-barrel crap, but it is still objectively schlock. It’s every trope in the book, a series of kills strung together with a plot you couldn’t care less about. But “schlock” is not always a pejorative.
After spending the last year watching an absurd amount of B-, C-, and Z-grade genre fare, I will say: don’t judge a 1980s horror movie by its VHS cover. A movie that sports this poster, and tells the story of a zombie crawling through the screen of a supernatural TV to terrorize a family of yokels, may sound like a gift from God, until you realize it was shot for pennies and stars actors who barely worked again for good reasons. Night of the Demons is a cut above: the slobbering demon effects are a wonder to behold, the actors look genuinely shocked by the otherworldly hell occurring around them, and occasionally it’s downright freaky. I gasped when a young girl, mid-coitus-in-a-coffin (bad move!), got her head twisted a full 360 degrees by a lumbering demon. That’s before the survivors realize that not only are they trapped in a haunted mortuary, but the house is surrounded by an impenetrable wall lined with barbed wire. The stuff of actual nightmares.
As chronicled in the special features of Shout! Factory’s surprisingly exhaustive Blu-ray release, Tenney and his team gave Night of the Demons their all. (That team including Rick Baker protégé Steve Johnson on SFX and Disney animator Kathy Zielinski, who oversaw the film’s opening sequence.) But the craft can be easily overlooked when the end goal is turning one of Donna Summer’s former backup dancers into a snarling hellbeast through the use of eye shadow and strobe light.
There isn’t much room for quality schlock in today’s landscape for the obvious reasons: the math doesn’t make sense. In movies, quality so often comes down to money spent, and today’s market either demands super-cheap cranked-out Tubi-filling #content or modestly budgeted horror that’s palatable for three-out-of-four audience quadrants. In interviews, Johnson has said Tenney’s budget was about $1 million. (Which amounts to about $3 million now, given inflation.) That’s not much for a movie budget, but it’s significantly more than what it cost to produce the bloody terror of Terrifier 2, one of the few go-for-broke splatterfests to find mainstream footing in this golden age of horror.
Tenney’s ability to put every dollar of his budget toward goopy horror effects that would entertain the audience (and not just sicken them) was an art — and an increasingly lost one, thanks to Hollywood’s shifting tides. When the VHS market bottomed out, the pathway toward financial success for a movie like Night of the Demons (or Night of the Demons 2, or Night of the Demons 3…) went with it.
In the rental marketplace, viewers did judge a VHS by its cover, and that was usually enough for a churnmeister like the legendary B-movie producer Roger Corman. Night of the Demons probably didn’t have to be good to succeed in 1988, but what’s there — gushing blood, shrieking blondes, and jocks who get their due — congealed into such a coherent-but-wacky ride that it was recently reissued in 4K.
Look, I am glad to live in a world where Ryan Coogler cashes his blank check on an intoxicating musical horror movie. We need that. But we also need hyper-hormonal movies where Gen-Z dudes get their jugulars ripped open by ghouls. Who will shepherd in that new era without sanding down the edges into whatever Fear Street: Prom Queen was going for?
While we wait, there’s Night of the Demons.