Demons is clearly up to no good right from the log-line: a group of movie theater attendees invited to an advance screening of a new horror film become demons, consumed by the film-within-a-film’s sheer vitality. Metaphoric subtlety is not this film’s strong suit. By the time we’re 15 minutes in, there’s precious little mystery about what is afoot. Then again, restraint isn’t everything when a director knows how to  channel obviousness into a kind of cinematic blunt force trauma. Demons is a cinematic demiurge, a fearless force of a film that opens with a gambit so idiotically overbaked that it can’t but sell you at the cost of its, and your, own soul. For the first third or so of the film, we watch the characters watch the film, cutting, with almost equal screen time, between the film and the film-within-a-film, as the two oddly resonate and rhyme with one another. Metaphysical events on screen mimic metaphysical events on the screen within a screen. The dead come back to life in both. It’s so obvious and inane that it becomes subtle. Almost entirely at a formal level, the film posits that the cinema theater is itself a centuries old crypt, and that film watching is an act of necromancy, a portal to the past but also to the unholy regions of the soul.

Without much metanarrative shenanigans – with no Scream-like characters discussing films within the film, with only one brief speech about the dark art of cinema, and even then one that doesn’t even seem to believe itself – Demons justifies its existence by asking one simple question: are you actually seeing the film you are watching? What does watching do, and how does how you watch this film reflect something broader about the act of watching itself? I don’t mean simply that it meditates on the act of watching at the level of the screenplay; I mean that it actually asks us to assemble the connections between the film and the film-within-a-film, which are purely visual and associative, never remarked on in dialogue.

Now, the film itself hardly earns the lofty comparisons, and more than any high-minded philosophical gambits, it’s just as easy to see Demons as a demented bit of autocritique in which cinema has fun excoriating itself, enjoying its own act of assaulting us just for the hell of it. But perhaps the superficial spirit of pure play is the point. Sometimes, you try to make a masterpiece. Sometimes you try too hard and fail. Sometimes your film works in spite of itself. Rarest of all is the film that tries and fails, and doesn’t even really make its point with a lot of sophistication, and still somehow justifies its existence through sheer gusto, as though channeling some cinematic otherwise entirely. Which, of course, places this film right in the heart of giallo, the sub-genre of Italian horror that always managed to strand lone, happy-go-lucky Americans in European cities tormented by the undigested weight of history and the centuries of violence lying in weight beneath the surface. The genre, most famously shepherded by Mario Bava and Dario Argento, turned the film space into a veritable vortex of phantasmic energies and stray forces with designs on our nerves, an attempt to render visible those currents typically operating below the perceptual threshold. Demons is the calling card of Bava’s son Lamberto, and there’s a sense in which turning the film’s assault back on cinema itself is its way not of answering the genre’s questions but extending its energies. It’s as though the younger Bava needs to exorcise the demons of the genre his dad created.

The film itself fashions a thoroughly cosmic vortex of impressions and sensations, signs and wonders, beyond any realistic or geographic space. A portentous crimson seeps up from the shadows only to dance with an azure aura of crystal menace. And the elder Bava’s favored yellow seems to emanate from some putrescent sickliness caking the screen, including in a putrescent looking bathroom that seems to have been coated in puss. We submerge in a thoroughly undomesticated space.

The film has no real interest in domesticating it. When one character hears of the 16^th century prophet and remarks “Nostradamus, sounds like a rock group to me,” the comment obviously satirizes her inelegance, her inability to wrestle with genuine history and the sort of predictive capacity it portends. She can’t see the ability of history to prophecize the future because she is too stuck in her own present, too entombed in ‘80s corporate culture, to notice. At one point, a cut of a downward knife in the film-within-a-film transitions to a woman moving in the same downward direction to look away from the violence on screen, unknowingly repeating it with her body. We, the film suggests, are possessed long before we start hunting for flesh.

But what is the film’s own suggestion other than that modern art itself constitutes its own divining rod, that it allows us to see better than we otherwise could, that pop cinema is part of a prophetic lineage? Art has haunted us, has us in its grasp, and that is a many-centuries-old pull, not a mere modern phenomenon. Early in the film, a key transition equates the projector in the film theater with the two headlights of a motorcycle in the film-within-a-film, which soon enough finds an echo in the flashlight of a movie theater usher. All of these seem to tease us with a direction, the hope of being guided somewhere, to something, but amidst all the light and shadow, just what we are meant to see, and how anyone could see it, is really the film’s thorniest conundrum. Bava shoves knife after knife (literally) into the assumption of cinematic sanity, into our ability to properly separate art from reality, to ground our viewing experience in prefigured ideas about the nature of the reality the film is conjuring. Demons is doing some fearless business chasing a metaphor it can’t quite earn, but bless it for trying.  

Score: 8/10