Demons (1985)

By the mid-1980s, Italian genre cinema was operating in a world of its own. The giallo wave that had crested through the 1970s was ebbing, and a looser, more visceral strain of horror had taken its place, one that owed as much to American splatter pictures as it did to the homegrown tradition of Mario Bava and his contemporaries. It is into this particular moment that Demons arrives, a West Berlin-set creature feature produced by DACFILM Rome and released in 1985. The premise is the sort of thing that sounds perfectly reasonable after midnight: a group of strangers accept free tickets to a mysterious screening at the Metropol cinema, and before the second reel is anywhere near done, the building has become a sealed-off slaughterhouse. If you want a companion piece from the same era of unhinged midnight horror, Re-Animator came out the same year and carries a similar "what is even happening" energy, while Nightmare City, another Italian production, had already been pushing this kind of frantic, gore-first approach a few years earlier.

The film was directed by Lamberto Bava, whose father Mario had essentially invented the visual grammar of Italian horror. Lamberto had been working in the industry for years, assisting on productions and building up a directing CV through television and low-budget features, but Demons represents the moment he found his register: loud, fast, and gloriously unconcerned with plausibility. Producing alongside him was Dario Argento, the Rome-born filmmaker whose reputation in the genre was already formidable by this point, and whose influence on the film's sensibility is fairly easy to spot. The screenplay, story credit going to Argento, Bava, Franco Ferrini and Dardano Sacchetti, does not exactly prioritise internal logic, but that is, you suspect, rather the point. In the principal roles are Urbano Barberini and Natasha Hovey as two of the cinema-goers caught in the chaos, with Karl Zinny, Fiore Argento (Dario's daughter, making her screen debut here), and Paola Cozzo rounding out the core group. None of them are asked to deliver the kind of performance that wins awards, but they commit to the mayhem with admirable enthusiasm. The effects work, practical throughout and produced on what was evidently not a lavish budget, has the rough-edged quality that either charms you immediately or sends you to the door.

Bava would return to this world fairly quickly, and if the film leaves you wanting more of the same chaotic energy, the directed-by-Lamberto-Bava follow-up arrived just a year later. For now, though, the original stands as a polished but unremarkable exercise in excess that has, over four decades, accumulated exactly the cult reputation these things are made for. The tagline, for what it is worth, runs: "They will make cemeteries their cathedrals and the cities will be your tombs." Whether the film itself lives up to that grandiose promise is very much the question.

Demons is absurd, sticky, vaguely offensive, and impossible to stop watching once you’ve started. Directed by Lamberto Bava (son of Mario Bava, which explains some of the flair) and produced by Dario Argento (the legend), this film is less a horror movie and more a fever dream where everyone’s main motivation is to see how much glitter they can shove into a demon’s costume. The demon mask looks like someone glued raccoon fur to a mannequin’s face and told it to scream forever. The gore is syringes of fake blood sprayed at the camera like it’s confetti. A neck explosion midway through the film defies the laws of physics. The acting is so over the top it's hilarious. Toni the Pimp is a classic all-time character for me and my friends now. A group of strangers get lured into a cinema to watch a mysterious horror film called Demons (meta!), only to realize they’re now in the movie and slowly transforming into literal demons. Why? Who cares! It’s just an excuse to set the chaos loose with people clawing their own faces off, a guy getting his throat torn out, and a finale where the cinema explodes into a neon-soaked inferno while a synth-heavy ‘80s rock anthem blares. Absolutely not scary. Weirdly entertaining. Demons is the kind of film you watch with a group of mates, pausing every five minutes to laugh. It’s so bad it’s good to the point of becoming a ritual

And honestly, that ritual quality is what keeps films like this alive long after more technically accomplished horrors have been forgotten. I find myself thinking about the communal experience of watching something so cheerfully unhinged, the kind of film that actively needs an audience around it to function properly. There is something almost generous about a film that commits so completely to its own nonsense. For me, the fact that it has no interest in being frightening is not a flaw so much as a statement of intent. Whether that intent was entirely conscious on anyone's part is another matter, but the result is the same: a film that people keep coming back to, not despite the absurdity, but because of it. Some films are ahead of their time. Demons has no interest in time at all.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 1985  | Watched: 2025-06-30

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Trailer

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Lamberto Bava: Demons 2 (1986)
More from Italy: Nightmare City (1980) · Cemetery Man (1994) · One Way or Another (1975) · Chicken for Linda! (2023)
More from the 1980s: Nightmare City (1980) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Style Wars (1983) · Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)