By Ben Bussey
It’s October, which means one thing: Halloween season, baby. In honour of every horror fan’s favourite holiday, we introduce BAH’s new month-long thread, Trick Or Treat. The premise is simple: we’ll be looking at a whole bunch of horror movies set at Halloween, and after careful consideration asking whether it’s a trick or a treat, in the time-honoured thumbs-up/thumbs-down style. Some of these will be old favourites revisited; some of them will be movies we’re checking out for the first time. But either way, we hope to bring to light seasonal movies with which you might not be so familiar, reminding us all that there are other appropriate viewing options on the night of 31st October besides that one particular John Carpenter movie.
So, I’m kicking things off with a movie which, in this instance, I am already well acquainted with, and one which in my personal estimation doesn’t get quite enough love: Adam Gierasch’s 2009 remake of Night of the Demons.
Edward Furlong pretty well sums up the appeal of this movie in one sentence on the DVD’s behind the scenes doc: you can’t go too far wrong with tits and blood. This is a sentiment I’ve long shared, although heaven (and hell) knows that plenty of movies in recent years have challenged that credo. 80s nostalgia and remake mania have dominated the horror genre this past decade or more, resulting in a great many lifeless, instantly forgettable duds which at best remind audiences of pleasures from years gone by, or at worst do nothing but retrace the steps of the originals with no sense of care or consideration. Pretty much every new remake announcement in living memory has been met with a contemptuous roll of the eyes by horror aficionados, but this hasn’t stopped the films making money, and as such it hasn’t stopped the remake cycle from rolling on regardless.
So many of these remakes exist for no other reason than to cash in on a marketable property. However, 2009’s Night of the Demons – along with a choice few other remakes, such as 2012’s Maniac – stands apart because it does what remakes at their best are supposed to do: finds a fresh perspective, brings the premise up to date, and makes some significant improvements.
See, the thing about Kevin Tenney’s original 1987 Night of the Demons is that, while it may pain me to say this, it really isn’t that good when all’s said and done. It has a tremendous central concept – Halloween party thrown at a creepy old mansion which turns out to be infested with demons – but the execution leaves a hell of a lot to be desired, with an often painfully slow pace and a largely unlikeable ensemble. Adam Gierasch summed it up pretty well when he and Jace Anderson spoke to us about the film back in 2010:“The thing with the original Night of the Demons is, I didn’t feel like it was as sacred ground as, say Halloween or Nightmare on Elm Street or Dawn of the Dead or Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I felt like it was a fun movie that I could do something interesting with, and there were certain things in it that I was like, wow, I could really sort of take that and really go farther with it to a certain degree, and I’m not even necessarily talking in terms of gore or anything like that.”
One of the key areas Gierasch’s film steps things up from Tenney’s is by presenting “a party you’d want to go to.” Far from the quiet, dull, wash-out of a house party the cast find themselves literally trapped at in the original, this time around Angela’s bash is a bona fide extravaganza: loud music, atmospheric lighting, crowds of people knocking back drinks and rocking out. You can pretty much feel the sweat dripping off the walls. Okay, so it isn’t too long before the cops bust the party up, but this opening act is vital for establishing the woozy, intoxicated mindset which is really what makes the film work, and makes it ideal late-night Halloween viewing.
Another smart move was to put up the age of the characters. It may well be part of the appeal of a lot of old school horror that it routinely casts actors in their twenties or older as high school kids, but ultimately, why shouldn’t twenty/thirtysomething actors play their own age in films of this kind? After all, for a great many people in the modern world, their partying days don’t end along with their education. Settling down, getting married, having kids and getting on the property ladder isn’t necessarily on the agenda of everyone who reaches adulthood anymore, and it’s notable that no conversations relating to such subjects ever come up here, nor is there ever a sense that anyone is being judged for their hard-drinking, loose-living, shag-happy ways. Monica Keena’s character may have ‘final girl’ written all over her from her first second of screentime given she’s the least obviously sexualised character, but while she may mock the “man-getting outfits” of her buddies, there’s absolutely no sense of virginal purity about her; witness her praising Edward Furlong as a talented fuck. This kind of non-judgemental attitude seems to me to remain a comparative rarity in horror today, particularly in demon-themed movies such as this which more often than not fall back on a stern, traditional Christian morality.
This, I think, sums up what I like about the Night of the Demons remake; it wholeheartedly, unabashedly embraces its own trashiness, largely without the veneer of ironic distance that taints the whole modern grindhouse revival. We might think of it as guilty pleasure, but this feels totally guilt-free to me. It knows what the audience wants to see – hot chicks, cool monsters, ridiculous gore – and it piles them on in abundance. The sex appeal is layered on so thick, it almost tricks you into thinking there’s more nudity than there actually is, but given that Diora Baird and Bobbi Sue Luther are barely contained in their tops for the bulk of the movie, it doesn’t make too much difference that their topless moments are brief (Luther’s in particular – ouch). Shannon Elizabeth as Angela was interesting casting; she might not be entirely convincing as a Goth chick, but she has that magnetism that makes it easy to buy her as a queen of both parties and hellspawn.
And it’s the hellspawn element that Night of the Demons 2009 really hits on the nose. The creature designs are just awesome, and made all the more potent by the fact that they’re brought to life almost entirely through practical make up FX. No two creatures are alike: from Angela’s Goat-Girl, to Dex’s maggot-faced Zombi poster boy, to Lily’s tentacled, Lovecraftian wet dream, and so on. Gierasch spoke of wanting to pay homage to the great demonic horror movies of year gone by – Lamberto Bava’s Demons movies, Fulci’s The Beyond and City of the Living Dead – and I think the movie does a great job of doing just that. Again, a problem with so many modern remakes is that they’re clearly the work of filmmakers with little or no real affinity for the genre, which clearly isn’t the case here at all. Gierasch and company know horror movies of this sort, they know what makes them work and why, and they deliver on all of it.
Without a doubt there are many holes we could pick out in the movie if we were so inclined; not all the jokes quite hit the mark, there’s maybe a little extraneous character work (on Edward Furlong’s role in particular), and the final act with the survivors attempting to wait out the demons for sunrise does get just a little tedious. But these are minor complaints for what is, all in all, a hugely satisfying slice of late night horror fun which makes for absolutely ideal Halloween viewing.
And as a final point of praise: the title track from 45 Grave has to be one of the best Halloween songs ever.
Verdict: Treat.