MY REVIEW

I’ve seen some great horror movies already this October, but one thing that has been largely missing from my overview of the genre thus far has been one of my favorite frequent elements of horror — campy fun. None of the films I’ve watched up until this point have delved too deeply into camp; both Event Horizon and The Hills Have Eyes have their campy moments, sure, but neither was really made with a camp sensibility in mind. Both seem to my eye to be designed to shock most of all, rather than to entertain. (Not that those are two mutually exclusive aims, of course, but I think that’s a topic for a whole different article).

To be honest, I’m not 100% certain Night of the Demons was made with camp “in mind,” either, but then again, Susan Sontag writes that “camp which knows itself to be camp… is usually less satisfying.” And while I don’t necessarily agree with everything Sontag writes in her seminal elucidation of camp — for one, she writes that “it goes without saying that camp is apolitical,” whereas I think that camp can be incredibly political — I generally agree with her here. To be more precise, I think that camp which knows itself to be camp is less intellectually satisfying; campy films that are purposely campy can be incredibly entertaining all the same.

And Night of the Demons sure is entertaining. First of all, the acting is hilariously over-the-top. Characters deliver lines in an exaggerated, whiny style that suggests middle-schoolers trying to talk like adults, or perhaps adults trying to talk like teenagers. Sontag calls camp “the sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience;” the acting style in Night of the Demons is definitely failed something. If these actors were aiming for “seriousness,” they’ve failed miserably; this is, after all, a movie that features this moment:

How can anyone take her seriously with that hair?

The acting calls attention to itself at every turn, with practically every single line reading; you know at all times that these are people who are performing. Camp sensibility extrapolates out that these sorts of films can reveal to us that all life is performance. Reading something as camp can make visible the tensions between all sorts of binaries that society takes for granted, most commonly male/female and heterosexual/homosexual, but also young/old, white/black, human/inhuman.

Night of the Demons, as with many camp films, especially campy horror films, winds up being a(n admittedly muddled) treatise on gender and sexuality. The film is concerned at many moments with sex. Sure, the aim of some or even most of this is to titillate the presumed straight male audience. But there are many moments that also seem designed to shame the audience’s objectification of the female characters, and by the end, we find ourselves rooting for the possessed Angela as she converts the disgusting, sex-obsessed male characters into her army of demonic minions.

Nowhere is the film’s have-it-both-ways attitude toward fan-servicey objectification, and simultaneous shaming of said objectification, more clear than in the character of Suzanne. She is introduced in an upskirt shot, the most stereotypical fanservice angle of all, as she bends over in a convenience store to inspect laundry detergent — a product that certainly carries gendered implications. Two greasy, sweaty, slackjawed men leer at her from behind the counter, providing obvious audience stand-ins.