A moral lesson on why you should never ever ever accept free movie tickets from a fella dressed as a bootleg Phantom of the Opera.

So, what happens when a group of people including a duo of college class skipping ladies, a pair of yuppie yuppies, a young first love couple, a wise old blindman and his nymphomaniac companion, a gang of Class of 84 reject punks, and a mackdaddy pimp and his two ho's all get trapped in a movie theatre possessed by demons? Total fuckin' chaotic chaos, of course. What makes it even better? When they go from movie watchers, to demon green gooze ooze possessed. God bless, the Italians!

Lamberto Bava in the director's chair. Dario Argento…

Hoop-Tober, Film 9 of 31:

This was some of the most fun I've had with a horror movie in a while. It's almost as if Bava was instructed to direct as 80s of a movie as possible, and proceeded to do exactly that; it's films like these that force me to use "80s" as an adjective, ahah. Seriously though, for what it is, Demons is perfect. The score/soundtrack, the special effects, the meta aspect of film (e.g. the movie theater)... I mean, this movie seemed like it was designed specifically for horror buffs of the time - it's awesome to see a director take his audience into consideration that much during the crafting of his film. There are also moments…

Demons is a rather trashy euro horror directed by Lamberto Bava and produced by Dario Argento who also had a hand in the screenplay.

A group of people are given theatre tickets by a strange bloke wearing half a metallic mask making him look like a cross between a cyborg and the Phantom of the Opera. Upon entering the theatre, there's a display stand with a figure on a motorbike and a metallic cheap looking mask hanging off it that looks like it came from Poundland. One of the girls at the theatre tries on the mask which gives her a little cut when she removes it. Anyway they all sit down for a screening of a diabolically bad horror…

Music for your reading pleasure

"We got to stop it I tell you, we got to stop the movie!"

YES!

This is how you make a horror film, or at least one that's great.

Oh, how I wish I was alive back in 1985 so I could have seen Demons in a movie theater instead of on the television in my bedroom; it definitely seems like the former was a much more enjoyable experience.

The premise in Demons is so great because it's something different that I've never seen before: theater patrons are attacked by demons while they're watching a movie about demons. How fucking rad is that? I bet seeing this film in the theaters would have been great…

CW: gore, violence, zombies

It's an old, old trope, but it speaks to a common idea in horror entertainment. When the point is to be scared, even just a little bit, you have to find ways to get the veterans of this sort of thing a little unnerved, a little thrilled, a little frightened. The problem with desensitization is that you no longer sustain your disbelief, you no longer feel what the characters are feeling. You know it's not real, and therefore, it's no longer scary. So this old trope lives because disbelief has always been a problem. "The screams are real." The scares aren't limited to what's on screen. This might actually happen to you.

Of course, this film…

Demons is a very 80's Italian action-horror film in which "demons" (mutants / zombies / formerly human monsters of some sort) wreck havoc in a movie theater! It is directed by Lamberto Bava, produced by Dario Argento, and written by the two along with frequent Argento collaborator Franco Ferrini and Dardano Sacchetti, who helped pen a slew of classic Italian genre films for the biggest names in the game.

Our movie starts when a college-aged girl is given a strange movie ticket by an imposing, silent man wearing a strange bionic mask. Tons of people show up to this mystery movie, shown at an impressively huge Art Deco movie palace, the Metropol, clearly inspired by Metropolis (1927). The few people…