“They will make cemeteries your cathedrals, and tombs your cities.”
I love Demons (1985).
It’s campy, kitsch, silly. But it’s also – crucially, and an element that’s so often overlooked in retrospectives of Lamberto Bava’s most successful film – scary.
The movie (released as Dèmoni in its native Italy) follows the plight of a group of strangers lured to an old movie theatre by a masked man. Soon, the filmgoers realise the screening – a film within a film, about a group of tomb raiders exhuming the grave of 16th-century French future seer Nostradamus – is a false pretence, and that the showing’s actual purpose is to raise the curtain on an entirely different (and far more sinister) phenomenon.
After one of the guests, trying on an ornamental mask in the theatre’s lobby, accidentally cuts herself on said mask, she begins to undergo a frightening transformation. The guest – Rosemary, played by horror legend Geretta Geretta (credited as Geretta Giancarlo) – begins to froth green foam at the mouth; her fingernails grow into long, sharp talons; her teeth grow crocodilian and predatory. She turns, in short, into one of Bava’s titular demons, and perhaps the only thing more scary than her new appearance – or the fact that she’s now possessed with the desire to attack, maim, and kill – is the fact that this demonic curse is highly contagious. Chaos breaks loose and, man – are we in for a hell of a ride.
The action begins when a guest of the film showing, Rosemary, scratches her face on this – admittedly sinister looking – mask. Willem Dafoe, are you in there?
Demons (1985) opens with our protagonist, Cheryl (Natasha Hovey) being followed on a train in Berlin, where the action takes place. Set to the synthwave score of Claudio Simonetti’s ‘Demon’, we get a disorienting, dreamlike sequence in which Cheryl’s pursuer – the masked man who sets the film’s events into deadly motion – flits in and out of the frame, creating jarring shifts in perspective in which we’re not fully sure whether she’s being chased or not. That feeling – of being, if not chased, at least followed – is one everyone can relate to in some degree or other, and it sets the tone for the film perfectly as the credits roll. (Also, I bloody love that soundtrack, and am listening to Simonetti’s score as we speak. Go on, plug it in while you read this Demons (1985) review – it’ll be the perfect reading companion as we unpack the demonic depravity to come.)
Natasha Hovey plays Cheryl, our key protagonist in Demons (1985).
This lowkey chase scene comes to a close when Cheryl comes face to face with the masked man, who hands her an invitation to the aforementioned film screening.
The man in the mask, seen later in the film. He's played by Michele Soavi, who would go on to direct The Church (1989), the unofficial third Demons film after Demons 2 (1986).
“I hope it’s not a horror movie”, Cheryl’s friend Kathy (Paola Cozzo) says as they make their way to the theatre.
It is.
The horrors of Demons (1985) take place in the Metropol in Berlin.
Soon, we’re meeting the guests in the cinema, who include college boys George (Urbano Barberini) and Ken (Karl Zinny), a blind man and his daughter, who’s his guide, and – in one of cult horror’s most brilliantly overacted and criminally underrated character turns – Bobby Rhodes as Tony, a pimp accompanied by two prostitutes, including Rosemary. Rhodes would also go on to star in Demons 2 (1986) as a different character, Hank – albeit one with exceedingly similar character traits to Tony the pimp. (Also in Demons 2? Asia Argento – Demons producer and legendary giallo director Dario's daughter, and a popular and well-regarded actor in her own right; Romero's Land of the Dead (2005) is among her highlights.)
Now, before I go any further, it’s worth addressing the elephant in the room here – the dubbing. Although the characters’ lip movements tend to match their words well (although, somewhat irritatingly, never perfectly), it’s clear the dialogue has been recorded separately and added in during the editing process. The reasoning here is that, for a while, Italian films like this one shot with no audio – instead electing to dub all dialogue later on.
Tolerance for dubbing tends to be a personal preference, but in cases like these it’s made all the more egregious by the fact that another strategy of Italian films of this era was to use actors from all over the world to cast the net of the target audience as wide as possible. This is why, when you’re watching films from a similar era as Demons (1985) in English, some actors’ lines will match up perfectly to their mouth movements, while for others – delivering lines in their native language – it’s a dog’s dinner.
But back to the action.
We get some nice tracking shots of the doomed theatregoers as they settle in for the evening’s entertainment, intercut with the action in the movie they’re watching. By this stage, we’ve already seen Rosemary accidentally cut herself on the sinister silver mask while trying it on, and as the film – which parallels the action about to unfold in the ‘real world’ when a character, after cutting themself on an ancient mask in Nostradamus’ tomb, begins to transform and attack his companions – progresses, we see her grow increasingly uncomfortable in her seat. Elsewhere in the auditorium, couples are making out; the usher is making their way through the rows raking a torch through the aisles; Tony is laughing loudly and brashly while waving a cigar around. The tension builds.
Rosemary, feeling a change sweep through her, flees to the bathroom. Her companion follows her soon after, and it’s in the cubicle that we get the film’s first proper transformation scene. It’s a doozy. Rosemary, now a demon, slashes her fellow prostitute across the face, who turns and runs. The Rosemary demon gives chase.
Geretta Geretta sells Rosemary's transformation perfectly.
Meanwhile, we’re still cross-cutting between this action, the events transpiring in the film-within-a-film, and the various (sub)plotlines taking place throughout the crowd.
One of these threads involves the blind man, whose daughter – hilariously, and for no apparent reason whatsoever – begins getting with a guy in the seat next to where her visually impaired father sits. I missed that they were related on my first watch, and thought they were married and that she was cheating on him, which made the couple’s demise – which comes soon – feel more of a didactic morality play on the part of the film. But no, IMDb corrected me on that front! That said, it's not too much of a stretch to spot a strong undercurrent of conservatism running below the surface of the apparent glee the film takes in dispatching its characters. The demon curse's first two victims, after all, are prostitutes – and the fact that it both looks like and behaves like an infection means it's not too hard to spot allegory lurking below the bloodshed.
No Demons (1985) review would be complete without a nod to its unsettling imagery, set to a vivid primary colour palette.
Anyways, the other hooker – whose name, or the actress, I can’t find (even with the formidable help of the resource that is IMDb!) begins to turn into a demon too, bursting through the curtain at the front of the theatre as she metamorphosises. It’s a little like the scene at the start of Scream 2 (1997), actually, where Jada Pinkett-Smith’s character staggers onto the stage and dies, publicly and gruesomely, after being stabbed by Ghostface. The prostitute turns into a demon, and we get our first proper glimpse of the film’s lore in action – that the demon curse (or infection, if you prefer) is transmissible, and easily so.
I couldn't find your name, but we'll always have your screenshot.
In this way, Demons (1985) is more of a zombie movie than most actual zombie movies these days – or at least, most ostensible zombie films since the turn of the century. Yes, in the 28 Days Later (2002) debate, Demons’ eponymous creatures wouldn’t qualify as zombies: but they look like them, act like them, and behave like them, hunting in packs and attempting to kill (and sometimes, eat) whatever’s in front of them. Yet the demons’ primary motivation doesn’t seem to be to use their victims as food, but instead to infect as many as possible and turn them to the demon cause. Because of this, we see demons vomiting blood and bile on people, scratching them, biting them…whatever they can do to gain as many new recruits in as short a time as possible. Like the Deadites of the Evil Dead franchise, the demons also seem to revel in what they’re doing; extracting as much malevolent glee out of the killing, but without the same level of self-referential humour as the Deadites, or the series of films they populated.
Anyways, all this adds up to bad, bad news for the goers of the theatre, and the speed of infection – combined with the relentlessness and viciousness of the demons – triggers a bloodbath. We’re talking eye-gouging, throat-ripping, disembowelling action. We’re only 30 minutes into the film, but already it’s expertly set up its premise, built tension, conveyed its lore, and set us up for the remaining hour of no-holds-barred horror and action to come.
Demons (1985) – the film that inspired Sixpence None the Richer's classic song "Kiss Me".
It’s what I love about Demons (1985), and indeed many films from this era and in this style – they hold few pretensions, they respect their viewers’ time (Demons clocks in with a modest runtime of just one hour and 28 minutes), and – in satiating viewers’ lust for carnage and comedy in equal measure – prove they know their audience to a tee. For us viewers, though, there’s not a huge amount of time to get to know the audience of the ill-fated theatre in Demons, because pretty soon the place has erupted in green goo and red blood, and people are fleeing for the exits. The stampede is halted, however, by the realisation that the doors have been sealed, having seemingly been replaced with a brick wall banning all exits. It’s a grave portent for our cast of characters, and – as the music shifts gear, from the mellower synth leanings of Simonetti’s score to more of a high-intensity heavy metal bent, the demons set about their work with brutal, chaotic efficiency.
More revelations come to light as the film wears on, too – the group discovers, for example, that the projectionist is automatic, that “no one has ever been here”, and in fact the whole setup is a trap – which gives the film a sense of propulsion and mystery. While all this is going on, we’re also introduced to a second plot – a car full of criminally inclined societal misfits with names like “Hot Dog”, “Ripper”, and “Baby Pig”, cruising around the city and snorting coke from a coke can (geddit?). Billy Idol’s “White Wedding” comes on, and it’s just fabulous. This whole film is just so, deliciously 80s; it drips with the decade, bathes in it, coats itself with the era’s iconic, instantly recognisable aesthetics. It’s fun to look at, yet it’s in establishing this side plot – the reason for which we’ll find out soon – that Demons (1985) loses its way a little. Bava’s film is at its best when it’s furnishing us with wall-to-wall demons action; when that takes a break, the movie slows down – and is all the poorer for it.
Some more mysteries are born and resolved – the theatregoers stumble, for instance, on a secret room, as the film attempts to offer up a (half-hearted) explanation for the film’s events – but again, the movie doesn’t need this to be effective. It’s at its best not when following a motley crew of new characters around the city, but when it’s giving us shots of demons stalking their prey in the cramped, claustrophobic confines of the cinema’s corridors. (As one example, a famous scene in Alien (1979) is parodied as a pair crawl, with a demon following hot on their heels, through a ventilation shaft).
We get shaky, disorienting handheld camerawork; slow zooms out of the theatre to illustrate the sense of helplessness and hopelessness of the characters’ collective situation; eerie red and blue lighting taking turns to suffuse the action.
Demons (1985): part comedy, certainly, but still damn scary when it wants to be.
By this time, the punks’ storyline has united them with the doomed denizens of the theatre, and they’re already getting picked off by the demons. (One of them – Nina, played by Bettina Ciampolini – is dispatched in a particularly nerve-clanging jump scare that I won’t soon forget.) We also get a brilliant, iconic shot – and one alluded to in the film’s posters and marketing material – of several demons ascending a set of stairs, eyes aglow and teeth (and fingernails) in ripping mode. Now, don’t quote me on this – I remember hearing or reading about it somewhere, and several viewings bear it out, but I’m not able to verify it – but I believe this scene was shot in reverse (with the demons walking backwards down the stairs) before being played forward. The demons’ movements are jerky, yet almost hypnotic and all the more menacing for it. They seem to half float, half lurch down the corridor of the theatre, underlying the malevolence of their motives and methods as their long shadows, casting up to the ceiling, give the shot a kind of dreadful, perverse symmetry.
Here's that shot.
As the bloodbath comes to a head – necessary for narrative reasons, but also because the film is running out of creative ways to kill people after a demon bursts from a woman’s back and a man is strung up, by his neck, with an old curtain rope – the film’s silliness threatens to get out of hand, but never feels totally out of keeping with the social contract we, as the audience, sign up for when we press play on a movie like this.
The ending – which echoes the pessimistic portents of Zombie Flesh Eaters (or Zombi 2; 1979), another Italian film of a similar era and with similar themes to Demons – leaves us with a grim, yet grimly satisfying, sucker punch to chew on, as that Simonetti score pops up again to lead us into the opening credits. (It’s okay… you can stop listening now!)
Man, I need to review some more Italian films!
Talking Terror is still new, so I’m a little light on similar content in that vein for now, but – given the zombie-like tendencies of Bava’s demons – how about you check out some of the other zombie horror reviews on the site? Try Braindead (1992), Handling the Undead (2024), MadS (2024), and Night of the Living Dead (1990) to keep you going.
And thank you, as always, for reading – especially if you made it this far!
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