Night of the Demon (1980) Dir. James Wasson
Prosecuted and banned in the UK upon release, eventual cuts were made for an 18 rating in 1994. The uncut version was finally released in 2022.
Night of the Demon is a legendary cult classic. It is also not to be confused with Jacques Tourneur’s 1957 classic tale bewitching tale Night of the Demon, the other cult classic, Kevin S. Tenney’s 1988 Night of the Demons (plural), or even Lamberto Bava’s 1985 nightmarish slice of sketchbook cinema, Demons -all of which are worth watching. For years, Wasson’s Night of the Demon was impossible to find, or rather so difficult, many simply gave up hope.
This slice of cryptozooploitation was all but forgotten by most mainstream film buffs. But recently, the film has been gifted a second life thanks to Severin Films, a production company that has been doing the Lord’s work in re-releasing cult classics on DVD and Blu-rays, including a beautiful two-disc Blu-Ray release.
The film has a reputation for being laughably incompetent; it’s not. As well as ruthlessly entertaining; it is. Unlike so many of its brethren, The Night of the Demon has a certain sense of style and humor that the other video nasties forgo for the sake of shock value. It remains, impossible as it may seem, one of the best, most entertaining bigfoot horror films. If you didn’t know that was a horror subgenre, then I’ll simply say, “Oh, you sweet summer child.”
Admittedly, being the best bigfoot film is a depressingly low bar. But it’s one that night of the Demon clears, if for no other reason, because of its bonkers twists and turns, outlandish kills, and how it moves with the speed of a Bob Gibson fastball. It’s a movie so singular that as you watch it, you notice how other movies have cribbed from it over the years. Friday the 13th fans will be delighted to see the scene where Bigfoot (Shane Dixon) tosses a camper around inside a sleeping bag like a shot put.
The fastball pacing is largely due to the editing, credited to Joy Rencher’s Editorial Service, and the score by Stuart Hardy and Dennis McCarthy. Night of the Demon doesn’t dawdle like so many low-budget movies of the time do. It understands what we need to see and what we don’t. All the while, Hardy and McCarthy’s music ranges from something you’d hear on a PBS after-school special, and the use of woodwinds is oddly amusing as it gives the tone almost too much of a light-hearted touch. Yet, as the film unravels, the score seems to be as mercurial as the story, jumping tones and styles, and somehow it works.
But Night of the Demon is an odd duck even by video nasty standards. Partially because the thing that makes it a video nasty, the gore and the sexual assault, were added after the film was made and without the director James C Wasson’s knowledge. Producers adding scenes to amp up the shock value of a movie are nothing new. Infamously, Producer Roger Corman hired Jimmy T. Murakami to film more extreme scenes for Barbara Peeters’s Humanoids From the Deep behind her back.
Wasson, directing under the name Jim West, was unaware of the film’s reputation and its ban from the UK. The scenes were added by the producer Jim L. Ball later on after a disastrous screening. The added post-production scenes were shot by Ball himself in his garage.
This goes a long way to explaining why Night of the Demon feels so uncanny. The narrative is laughably convoluted with the film opening with Bill Nugent (Michael Cutt), an anthropology professor, in the hospital with a bandage over the lower half of his face like a soon to be revealed Bat-Man villain, as he tells the authorities what happened.
A scant few minutes later we meet Carla (Shannon Cooper)-in flashback-as she proceeds to tell us a story-in flashback.Soon the movie becomes a narrative funhouse with different characters giving us flashbacks, while the whole movie itself is a giant flashback. To say nothing of how Wasson and Ball show us other characters off by themselves without Nugnet present so he couldn’t possibly know what actually happened.
Yet, as wild as the narrative structure is, it does perfectly fit the kind of movies Wasson and Ball made prior to Night of the Demon: gay porn films. Night of the Demon, as critic Elizabeth Purchell points out in her Letterboxd review, “Emulates the porn loop structure better than any horror film I’ve ever seen…” Ball isn’t unaware of what he’s doing as he delights in meshing death screams with orgiastic screams of delight.
One scene in particular shows a couple in the woods interrupted mid-coitus by ol’ Bigfoot. The man is pulled out from the van, as it rocks and shakes from Bigfoot attacks. The naked woman inside shrieks in horror as her former lover slides down the windshield, blood streaking along the glass, as her cries mimic a lover’s screech, as the camera slowly zooms into her horrified pupils.
The script is an idea from Ball himself and was written by Mike Williams. Night of the Demon takes a different view of Sasquatch. Often Bigfoot is portrayed as either lovable or feral, but here he’s simply a mean ol’ cuss lashing out at the encroaching modernity of the times. But the real departure is that while for most of the movie we don’t get a good look at Bigfoot, when we finally do, he seems like something out of one of those infamous Bigfoot erotica e-novels. Why does he shave his chest?
Shot by John Quick, Night of the Demon, like most video nasties, looks cheap and muddy, but maintains a sense of lyrical if morbidly witty visual composition. The opening shot of blood pooling next to the opening title sequence, as the cameras reveal a shockingly human-sized Sasquatch footprint being a prime example. The playful opening has echoes of James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad.
A legit nasty, Night of the Demon was banned but no one was ever prosecuted. The film eventually was granted an “18” by the BBFC (British Board of Film classification) after they agreed to cut a minute and forty three seconds from the final cut.
What was cut? Two scenes:
- Bigfoot ripping the schlong off a passing biker.
- A scene that has Bigfoot reaching into a character’s belly and using their intestines as a flail.
Both of these scenes exist in the uncut version available on, of all things, Amazon. I mention this, not as a plug, but to highlight how Night of the Demon went from being banned to being widely available online for anyone of all ages, uncut. No one would ever think to tell Bezos that he shouldn’t stream Night of the Demon because of the children. Oh, no, for these people, the only real danger to children exists in physical libraries.
The castration scene is a banger of a scene despite the actual castration never being shown, making the cut all the more silly. But there’s a zany, sick humor embedded in the scene. The biker pulls over to take a piss, only to have Bigfoot yank his Johnson off. Wasson and Ball end the scene with the biker leaning against his motorbike, legs spread, like he’s taking a piss, the camera zooming in on the blood as it trickles down the sides of the bike.
The use of “intestines as a flail scene” comes at the end during the final climactic battle, done all in slow-mo, horribly lit, to the point where you have to squint to figure out what’s going on. Though they do make sure to get a clear shot of ol’ Sasquatch digging his hands into the poor guy’s belly. While not for the squeamish, the scene is tame by modern standards, with the little touch of Bigfoot swinging the guts around like a melee weapon, sadly, being a kind of absurd touch we’ve long stopped seeing in these low-budget affairs.
The final act of the film, where Nugent and his students meet Crazy Wanda (Melanie Graham) is when the train officially leaves the tracks. Ball and Mike Williams’s script morphs into an O’Henry tale of pulpish proportions. Carla’s zealously religious father thinks she’s defiled herself with a local boy; she hasn’t, and casts her out into the woods during a thunderstorm, where she has her unfortunate encounter with the Bigfoot. Wanda’s tale of woe dovetails into murder and possible lust with the hairy beast, as she recounts her tale to the horrified city folk.
Notably, while the BFFC found issue with these scenes in particular, they did not seem all that perturbed by the scene where Bigfoot sexually assaults a fifteen-year-old Wanda. (Young Wanda is played by the same actor who plays the adult version of Wanda.) Graham’s performance is the least stilted of the bunch and comes off as unnerving. It’s less a child and more an adult pretending to be a child, and becomes a weird sort of Lenny from Of Mice and Men type performance granting the character the right amount of untethered to reality necessary.
Much like Bigfoot gutting the student, the sexual assault scene is shot with almost no light and is hardly explicit, with the two actors merely lying atop each other and wiggling about. Still, for a group concerned with the offensive content that might scar the little ones, they were, ironically, unconcerned with what could arguably be the most traumatic aspect of the film. No matter how badly lit or melodramatically off-the-rail the scene may come off to mature adults.
I haven’t even gotten to the cult that has sprung around the big hairy guy, or even the rantings of Crazy Wanda’s hillbilly evangelical father. I’ll let you discover that for yourself. The acting is often criticized as bad, and while it’s not great, it feels in tandem with the kind of no-nonsense patter of Dragnet. Night of the Demon is such a goofy, nutty ride that if it were to lean into any of the absurd dramatic elements with anything other than a grim stoic face, the whole thing would collapse.
Night of the Hunter is a gem of low-budget cryptid horror and a gem of a video nasty. At once deserving of its reputation while also embodying why the reputation itself is so patently silly.
Images courtesy of Gemstone Entertainment
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