Night of the Demons was released near the end of the 1980s, after the Hollywood horror boon had already worked itself out and then reworked itself to death. In the back-half of the decade, the slasher films became both more banal and more outré. Sometimes this simply meant films flailing around, trying whatever they could think of, to get attention. Sometimes it meant that the films were genuinely chasing unclarifiable interests and stray sensations toward unexpectedly exploratory truths. Sometimes the difference could be impossible to discern.

Case in point: 1988’s Night of the Demons, a ghoulishly opaque slasher that is, on one hand, exceedingly debased, necessarily brutal, and grossly misogynist, investing fully in the baser elements of the genre. On the other, Night of the Demons joins films like Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II and Slumber Party Massacre II in being not only a supernatural slasher but a surpassingly strange one, a film whose limitations double as an exploration of the genre’s own failure. Night of the Demons depicts a genre so routinized and ossified that it was both flatlining and collapsing in on itself. The film figures the Reagan decade as a literal haunted house locked in a perpetual cycle of recurrence, tormented by unseen, tenuously acknowledged forces from the past. This is a film whose failures are not a matter of the film exploding out, but imploding inward on itself.

Night of the Demons is less forthright in this direction than Prom Night II, which literally frames its killer as a revenant of an unacknowledged past, and Slumber Party Massacre II, whose villain is a parody of a greaser. But Night of the Demons still seems fully aware of the weight of history bearing upon it, and the limits of its imagination to escape it. “What do you think this is, some kind of Depression or something,” remarks Sal Romero (William Gallo), one particularly dubious archetype of a ‘50s greaseball to the protagonist’s younger brother. Soon after, he cites Rocky Balboa, who he sounds like a bad facsimile of. Later, the younger brother mocks his sister Judy (Cathy Podewell), the designated final girl, who is dressed as Alice in Wonderland, as the “best Bride of Frankenstein I ever saw.” He also teases her would-be beau Jay (Lance Fenton), calling his costume “the Bogeyman” even though he is thoroughly costume-less. Because he is who he is, and he wears what he wears, however, he still comes dressed like a parody of a preppy all-American type. In this world, it seems, the costumes are so non-specific and anonymous that they can’t be recognized, and the everyday attire is perhaps more a costume than anything else.   

All these teens are on their way to a haunted house party for no discernible reason, as are a number of other teens the film officially labels “friends.” When one of the characters, mid-drive, asks “I don’t know why I’m hanging out with you two wipes,” she seems to be pulling the cards out from under the writer’s sleeves, ridiculing the tableaux of different archetypes she’s been summoned into, characters assembled to fill out a screenplay rather than because they organically seem to connect. When they arrive, another character tells the back story of the house: the ex-owners “sure met a gruesome end, didn’t they” before his girlfriend remarks “they sure did,” as though presenting a history lesson to the audience, before a cut to the moon looming over them like a strange cinematic overlord winking at the audience. When Linnea Quigley’s Suzanne uses her erotic appeal as a disguise so her friend Angela (Amelia Kinkade), who is organizing the party, can steal a truly impossible amount of beer and snacks, apparently none of the other customers mind her doing so in full view. Nor do the proprietors, who are so distracted by Suzanne’s character type that they don’t notice Angela walk out right in front of them. Everything, and everyone, in this film is a marionette following a script. Some of them are just a bit more willing to search for the strings on their backs.

If each character is a preconditioned type, in the film’s key moment, they gather like a tableaux of doomed icons, looking together into a mirror for their alter egos. It cracks, and director Kevin S. Tenney shoots their reflections in the mirror shards like the fragmented parts and pieces they are constructed from. From this point, the film itself cracks, staging the demonic invasion that consumes the back-half of the film as a dissent into formal madness, a complete destruction of the film’s already slantwise rhythms. Any sense of protagonist or character growth pitilessly dissolves for the demons who show up and who clearly do not play by any screenwriter’s rules. The film begins to cut associatively, perhaps randomly, between characters in the house like a wraith wandering through walls. While Night of the Demons lacks the color scheme of an Italian giallo picture, it is gifted with the Italian sub-genre’s free-form madness, as well as its indiscretion with regard to narrative cohesion. The film’s final half hour, which feels genuinely crazed, plays like a madcap comedy of confused characters cavorting in a world whose rules have suddenly collapsed under them, running amok as they hold onto whatever conception of order they can temporarily hold to.

In the film’s final moments, the ostensible demons remain trapped in the house, but the film suggests that the damage to is, and the world’s, sanity has already been done. Night of the Demons closes with a final, seemingly unrelated, kill that implies an all-too banal evil underpinning the world, an undercurrent of cosmic disarray that only pretends to need a movie-style haunted house to control and channel it. The conclusion implies that hatred and dispassion unleash not only self-consciously apocalyptic but decidedly everyday forms of destruction, a violence that is both self-propagating and that requires no supernatural demons to summon it.

Score: 8/10