Who hasn’t wanted to take the ongoing stress of making a living and put that energy into radical body transformation? Why not take the seething tension of interpersonal conflict and use it to shed your nails and start eating faces? If you’re going to dabble in nihilism, how can specific acts of score-settling human cruelty and the disassembling of all systems compare to the act of liberatory demonic possession?
This isn’t the usual possession movie, where the nuclear family is under attack from personal liberation and nothing is more sacrosanct than the ability of the Catholic Church to wield institutional magic to fix things and bring those renegade wives and children back under sway. No, this is “No Future” Sex Pistolry served up with gnashing fangs and torrents of guts and the kind of freedom that can only come from the collapse of all banking systems.
The utter magic of Lamberto Bava’s Demons is that, 40 years on, it feels as if it has been perfectly designed to appeal to everyone: People who hate horror will be suitably disgusted and armed with material to express just how far gone people are; grad students studying the way the punk ethos echoes over the intervening decades will find a through line on par with the most elaborate of Bene Gesserit schemes; fantasy survivalists are gonna swoon for the Patrick Nagel neon cocaine post-society; and goreheads know what’s up by reputation. Deep down there’s that theme that reaches deep into the craw of everyone who loves, or even only tolerates, movies: What happens if the movie isn’t bound? What if it expands beyond the boundaries of the screen? What happens if the movie is more than that?
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The fact that this is a delirious dive into the demonic that serves as a superb zombie movie just as easily? That’s like the finest sauce for an exceptional feast. This movie delivers in less than 90 minutes some exceptional world-building, relatable (sort of) characters and deeply creative gore. It finds different ways of infiltrating your mind, and it has that central hook that’s so good hundreds of films have tried to rip it off, but no one has ever remade it — which is the highest honor any horror film can receive.
Any film that features the iconic Geretta Geretta as a sex worker deciding to seize the means of production and rend them asunder is worth your time. But there’s also a brief appearance by Paganini Horror’s Jasmine Maimone in the film-within-a-film that proves the initiating event for all this deviltry, and fun turns from producer Dario Argento’s daughter Fiore (Phenomena) and Bobby Rhodes as a pimp with a strong survival instinct. Add in a great post-New Wave hair metal and synth-freakout song score (a cinematic universe with space for Mötley Crüe and The Adventures is one well worth exploring), as well as that Italian horror ability to get into and replicate the eschewing of logic and embrace of texture of dreamworlds, and you have one of the all-time great horror movies about going to the movies.
