Demons
directed by Lamberto Bava
starring Urbano Barberini and Natasha Hovey
Synapse Films
A group of people are handed tickets by a mysterious stranger to attend the sneak preview of a horror movie at the Metropol Theater. During the screening, an eclectic assortment of audience members starts to transform into demons.
Based upon the premise alone, Demons, Dario Argento’s 1985 foray from acclaimed Italian horror director and screenwriter to producer, seems straightforward and conventional, but with its execution and presentation, the film is anything but.
Demons came out at the peak of ’80s horror, and one must check the calendars of horror history to see why and how it’s so well seated in the ascension of the genre. Watching it today, one can imagine the basic premise of director Lamberto Bava’s Demons was a European response to Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead, which must have made quite the impression. The film echoes Raimi’s 1981 masterpiece both in narrative and stylistic choices.
Whereas The Evil Dead raises the dead when evil passages are read aloud from the Necronomicon, Demons are awakened by the showing of an unnamed film whose faux production may as well have been located in Morristown, Tennessee.
Raimi’s films lean into the chaotic and gut-wrenching style-over-reality of European gore, and it makes perfect sense that Italians would steal that back, making it their own. Flesh tears like paper, teeth and nails overwhelm maws and claws, and gore oozes, shimmers, and glows in the darkness of the Metropol theater. There’s a level of inventiveness and originality that yields a katana-wielding demon killer riding a motorcycle, hacking and slashing inside of a movie theater. Full stop.
The Evil Dead-influence aside, Bava spring loads the boilerplate framework of “movie turns audience into demons” as a sandbox to play out all the major tropes of contemporary horror of the time. There are echoes and rhymes of Rick Baker’s mutations and transformations, Survival horror befitting George Romero (Night of the Living Dead), and allusions to the body disfigurement of Rob Bottin (The Thing makeup art), David Cronenberg (The Brood, Naked Lunch), and even Ridley Scott’s chestburster (Alien). Demons hits all the marks and fires on all cylinders as an amalgam and zeitgeist that is dead center of horror in 1985. However, Sergio Stivaletti’s practical effects still manage to take things to yet another level and set a standard for auteurs like Peter Jackson.
For the bulk of its US audience, Demons may have been only a footnote and staple from the era of grainy and undeservedly obscure VHS rental. Most of its US fans were deprived of seeing a film about a movie theater turning its patrons into demons in an actual movie theater. Compound that with a shorter and more awkward US edit and the fact that it was likely watched on a 19-inch CRT, and it’s painfully clear why Demons doesn’t get the longstanding notoriety it deserves.
Demons is deep-rooted in the 1980s and even smacks of Italian design and a new wave aesthetic whose undercurrents permeated the decade’s most notorious motifs. Claudio Simonetti, keyboardist of prog rock band Goblin, provides a synth soundtrack that by itself, to this day, is flat-out amazing but manages to be further augmented by an uncompressed audio mix from the film’s original audio masters. But Demons’ soundtrack also boasts tracks by Billy Idol, Rick Springfield, Mötley Crüe, Go West, Accept, and Saxon.
Synapse Films’ 4K Ultra HD disk is loaded with extras and 3 versions of the film — Italian and International English versions as well as the inferior US version — and even includes your own collectible “Golden Ticket” to the Metropol.
The 4K transfer from the original camera negative really sets off the splatter and neon of this technicolor horror jewel. The result is something seemingly fresh, new, and frankly a bit surreal. And, with the advent of affordable large screen TVs and home audio, audiences previously unable to have the theatrical presentation will finally get the thrills and chills of being trapped inside the Metropol Theater and run the risk of being turned into demons.
