Creeptober Day 24: Night of the Demons (1988)
Party with the recently dead and currently possessed with Night of the Demons!
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There are lots of horror movies set on or near Halloween. Night of the Demons is arguably the most Halloween-y of them all. So, for day twenty-four of Creeptober, exactly one week before the big day, we’re taking a trip to Hull House for Angela’s party.
Read on for our thoughts on Night of the Demons (1988) as well as a recap of the movie, and join the conversation on our Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram!
Reacting to Night of the Demons
If you’ve been keeping up with these Creeptober reaction articles, then you’ve surely noticed that I throw around the word “favorite” a lot. It’s true that I do consider my list of favorite horror movies to be extensive, but some people might think I use the word too loosely. Well, I’ll be more definitive right now. Night of the Demons is my third favorite Halloween movie of all time (that includes Halloween-adjacent movies as well).
I watch Night of the Demons every year near Halloween, and I am always excited to see it again. How do I even begin explaining why it’s so amazing? I’ll start with the subgenre of horror I think it fits in. Night of the Demons is similar to movies like The Evil Dead series, Demons (1985), Demons 2 (1986), Dead Dudes in the House (1989), and the like. They’re all about people who become possessed and turn into grotesque monsters who may or may not retain some of their living personality. When the possessed people kill or attack others, their victims also become possessed and start killing. In the past I’ve referred to this as the “demonic zombie” subgenre. That label got some pushback from people, but I stand behind it as an accurate description.
I love these kinds of movies and wish there were more of them. There are more than I listed above, but there aren’t nearly enough in existence. Night of the Demons is a perfect example of why the “demonic zombie” format works so well. Like a zombie movie, there is an increasing sense of doom because as more people die, more monsters are made. Also, since the monsters have personalities twisted from their former selves, the character moments are often either cruel, funny, or both. And this all leads to some wildly inventive kills which can lead to fantastic blood and guts. It really might be the perfect subgenre of horror.
In Night of the Demons specifically though, the characters help the movie shine. Judy might seem a little bland as a heroine at first, but she has some superb moments as the movie goes along. Seeing her go from scared and passive to torching demons with an improvised flamethrower is incredibly fun. I also like Rodger for how committed he is to running away at the first sign of trouble. He’s hilarious. Stooge is also fun and funny in a jerky way. Max and Frannie are basically there to provide exposition and a couple more bodies to the death count, but I like them too. My favorite characters though, are Suzanne and Angela.
Suzanne is played by Linnea Quigley, one of the brightest stars of the scream queen era spanning the 1980s and 1990s. She is amazing, and this role in Night of the Demons combined with her role as Trash in The Return of the Living Dead (1985) made her one of my absolute favorite horror actors when I was growing up. I’m still a big fan of hers today and always love it when I see her pop up in something I’m watching. And in Night of the Demons, her demonic transformation is unforgettable.
And then there’s Angela, played by Amelia Kinkade. For Angela, it starts with the movie’s poster (or for me, the VHS box when I first saw the movie). Angela’s demonic face is on the poster, and the tagline reads, “Angela is having a party, Jason and Freddy are too scared to come… but you’ll have a hell of a time.” As a young and impressionable viewer when I first saw this, having Angela’s name listed with Freddy and Jason made a big impact on me. She must be important, right? Yes, she is important, and she makes an indelible impression in the movie.
Angela’s demonic transformation comes in stages. But first, there’s her dance. Angela’s strobe-light dance to Bauhaus’s “Stigmata Martyr” is one of my favorite things in any horror movie ever. Then she bites Stooge and we see her demon teeth. Then she gets more demonic, and seeing her float down the hallways of Hull House is iconic. Later she’s burned by Judy, and she becomes even more fantastic with her melting, smoking flesh. Angela is the best part of Night of the Demons, which is a movie already overflowing with low-budget charm and trashy-horror brilliance.
This reaction is already going a bit long, and I’ve barely begun exploring my adoration for Night of the Demons. I’ll just end by saying that this movie is pure Halloween. The costumes, the party, the seance, the demons, the killing, the candy, even the urban legend of apples with razor blades. It’s all here, and it’s all outstanding.
Night of the Demons – A Recap
An outcast, Angela, invites a group of her classmates to a party on Halloween night. The party is at Hull House, an abandoned funeral parlor on the outskirts of town. The rumors say that, on Halloween night, a member of the Hull family murdered the rest of their family before killing themselves. Legend also says that an underground stream surrounding Hull House keeps the evil spirits of the property from escaping. The stream is marked by a brick wall that encircles the house.
Judy, her boyfriend Jay, and their friends Max and Frannie arrive at Hull House. An uninvited guest, Sal, is already in the house after asking Judy’s brother where she was going. Angela, her friend Suzanne, and their classmates Stooge, Rodger, and Helen arrive, and the party begins.
After a while, Angela decides it’s time for a seance. Everyone except Rodger gathers together in front of a mirror for a “past life seance.” The seance is performed by looking into a mirror until it turns black, then everyone is supposed to see Angela in a past life. As the mirror goes dark, Sal says something which distracts everyone. As everybody else looks away, Helen sees a demonic creature in the mirror, as well as a vision of her own death. She screams, and the mirror falls forward, shattering into pieces. Afterwards, noises are heard coming from the basement where the crematorium is.
Some kind of invisible force leaves the basement and goes into the party room. Everyone feels cold and experiences smells. The force enters Suzanne’s mouth, but nobody notices. Angela says they’re all experiencing demonic infestation. Most of the partiers don’t believe her, but Rodger and Helen want to leave. They go, and everyone staying behind at Hull House splits up into pairs for various reasons (Judy, Jay, Max, and Frannie go together, but they separate into pairs shortly after). Before Suzanne goes to find a bathroom with Stooge, she kisses Angela. Angela, alone with Sal, smiles.
As everyone continues to move around the house and split up, people start getting dead and possessed. And when they are possessed, they kill their friends who also become possessed. Helen is the first to go, disappearing as she and Rodger search for the gate in the brick wall outside, and later falling, dead, onto the roof of a car. Stooge has his face bitten by Angela (who was possessed by Suzanne’s kiss). Jay’s eyes are gouged out by Suzanne. Stooge breaks Frannie’s neck and smashes Max’s arm off with the lid of a casket.
The remaining survivors—Sal, Rodger, and Judy—find each other, then they immediately become separated. Sal is killed when he falls from the roof saving Judy from Angela. Judy and Rodger lock themselves in the basement, and they end up fighting their way back out by using the gas pipe from the crematorium oven as a flamethrower. They escape from the house when Rodger leaps through a window. With their possessed friends closing in on them, Rodger and Judy barely manage to climb over the brick wall and across the underwater stream. The sun rises, and the demonically possessed teens disappear in a cloud of smoke.
As Judy and Rodger walk home in the morning sun, an old man is grumpy. The man goes inside and is served a slice of apple pie by his wife. The man, who put razor blades in a bunch of apples to hand out to kids on Halloween, dies a horrible death when the razors baked into the apple pie cut his throat. His wife kisses his head and drinks her morning coffee.
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