On the surface, Lamberto Bava’s 1985 film DEMONS is just another entry into the bad movie pantheon, what with its glowing-eye monsters, a famous transformation scene where teeth are pushed out of a prosthetic head’s mouth by demon fangs, and direction by acclaimed Italian director Mario Bava’s son. But it can also be read as something much more profound.

DEMONS is an amazingly heavy-handed treatise on the corrupting power horror movies supposedly have on the audience. Exploiting the conservative commentator’s incessant refrain that these movies have the power to influence and dictate violent behavior to the audience, DEMONS posits this question: “What if a movie actually transformed the audience into monsters?”

Of course, no single critique will quiet the argument that violent behavior is stoked by video games, loud music, and horror movies. We have an innate fear of effectiveness of advertising (and by extension political propaganda). But instead of attacking those engines of our socio-economic system, it is far easier (and safer) to attack a minority genre of entertainment – the weak gazelle in the pack, as embodied as a niche market.

The movie takes place in West Berlin, the divided Cold War city always on the verge, a symbol of Capitalist excess pounding at the wall of Communist political conformity, drab poverty, individualistic oppression, etc. (Is it just by chance that the movie’s movie-goers are trapped by a large concrete wall where the doors once were?) By the time the demons (those media-saturated degenerates) have overrun the city and doomed free society, the metaphor is heavy-handed and gloved by schlock.

The story starts with the lure of a free movie tickets. The tickets embody the double fold here – first playing on themes of the test audience of market research. That influential cross section of demographics that drive the desecration of so many genre films (how many happy endings have been re-filmed and tacked on because of those pesky audience comment cards? Notice, too, all the shocking ground-breaking film posters in the lobby). Second, the free tickets, themselves, threaten the Capitalist purpose of movie making, the commodification of narrative and star-making vehicles, not to mention the restoration of the old movie theater, are all subverted by the profitlessness of the evening.

As the audience moves into the theater, there is the allure of a shiny fetish object – the demon mask. Again, as a strictly horror convention, it functions as the prime mover, the object of evil, that needs to be activated by blood. Pretty standard. But it, also, operates as a commodity fetish object.  First, it is a lobby display, extending the reach of the film, by producing prop-like 3-D advertising (the idea of souvenir). Second, by actuating the contagion of the Demon curse, the nick on the face creates patient zero of the infection (not surprisingly it is a prostitute that grabs the item and sets off the infection!), the mask operates as a metaphor for the desirability of the commodity object. By being a singular item, on display in the lobby, the mask functions as highly alluring and rarefied, therefore increasingly its power as a metaphor for the panic of consumption (the idea that there are not enough objects for everyone who wants one, thereby creating the need of possession which spreads like a virus).

“What is wrong with that girl?”

As the movie-within-the-movie starts, the audience watches the audience watching, as well as the essential parts of the internal movie. The movie-within-the-movie is interrupted to introduce the various doomed characters in the audience, and instill a sense of connection and identification that will deepen the coming horror. There are teens on the make, sitting behind the unhappily married couple out for their anniversary; there are the sloppily smooching lovebirds; a blind theorist and his seeing eye girl; and a pimp with his two whores. All are poorly defined, stiffly acted, and overdubbed in post-production.

What is interesting about the group, though, is the inclusion of the criminals – the pimp and his two prostitutes. The fact that the two ladies-for-hire are the first two to succumb to the demon transformation should not be surprising.  They are the logical choice to embody the corrosive evil since they are vanguards of morality and outside the social structure of the responsible economy. There is, also at work, the idea of body modification. Since prostitutes transform their bodies into specific commodities ,who’s access can be purchased for increasing prices, it makes sense to have them the assume the most graphic and visual demonic transformations. Their bodies are overtaken and transformed by a blood borne contagion – the demon inside.  The metaphor is one of consumption, consuming. By acting on the desire for a commodity, the actor is changed into a creature of need, a singular purpose to extend and support the commodity base. The prostitutes make this physical, drawing forth the allusion.

To have the second victim (the other prostitute) attacked in a bathroom, and, then, fall through the screen of the movie being shown is a brilliant, if a bit contrived, touch of flippancy. Here we see the critique of art influencing life–literally plowing through the fourth wall. The movie scene that the morphing prostitute falls out of is a scene where a demon is attacking a young woman in a tent. As the screen knife tears into the tent, the possessed prostitute uses her long nails to rip at the movie screen. The disorientation on the movie audience is profound. They are confused as life blurs with the entertainment. The effect is meant to be horrifying.

After the initial transformation and the famous fangs pushing teeth out effect, DEMONS cuts to a speeding car of petty thugs. Punks, in every sense of the word. They are snorting coke out of a straw stuck in an actual Coca-Cola soda can. The visual pun may have deeper importance. The drug addict car thieves represent the other side of criminality. As opposed to the prostitutes, the drug addict car thieves commit crimes against commodities. They steal and destroy, unproductively, other people’s items. Yet, they, too, are damned to brand loyalty and a crass sort of consumption that moves Capitalism forward. As simple cannon fodder, these idiots offer no resistance, being chomped up quickly and effectively by the hive of Demons, unleashed by violent media depictions. They are solely a consumer group, swayed by the basest and most obvious forms of manipulation. Their snorting cocaine out of the Coke can implies a critique that is void because of the vacancy left by their nihilism. While they scoop up of the spilled powder they are shown as slaves to the very consumption they seek to rebel against.

ZOOOM!

Once the movie has tipped the balance between survivors and demons, the action takes on a near-slapstick absurdity that is indicative of schlocky horror flicks. We are treated to some nasty effects, such as the mini-demon emerging from a woman’s back, as well as some touching transformations of supposed friends or lovers. DEMONS reaches deep to provide us with some truly stupid moments – take the motorcross battle scene, where our hero and his best girl zoom around the theater as the possessed bounce and wail and move their bad rubber glove hands in windmills. Our hero impossibly drives over the seats, then uses a ninja sword to cut down the baddies with slice, stab, slice. The whole time the soundtrack is completely overtaken by Udo’s ACCEPT blaring out. And that is not even mentioning the stupidity of a helicopter crashing down from the roof.

The end of DEMONS is equal parts a conventional horror “gotcha” moment and a hint at survivor porn. The fact that our hero’s best girl turns into a green-slime vomiting-demon, and is blasted off the back of the stallion white jeep by the Aryan princess in the front seat, makes no sense considering how our hero’s mangled arm has been featured since the theater escape. It is out of sync with the rest of the movie’s silly cosmology. But that is not as contrived as the whole survivor porn conceit. The white jeep with the well-armed motherless family, heading out to the country to see if there are any other survivors, is the wet dream of the Cold Warriors. The singularity of self-reliance, prepared and willing to defend one’s self (and implied continue the correct way of political life), became a cottage industry during the post-World War II Capitalist contract.  See Geopolitics of Hibernation. As the 1980s rolled on, the survivor porn genre would take on a more militarized form (RAMBO, RED DAWN, DAY OF THE DEAD,) offering a corrective against the hopelessness of the nuclear arsenals and the mutual assured destruction gambit.

How much the movie’s successes are dependent upon the subtle undercurrents of social commentary seems overshadowed by the silliness of the genre’s snide trappings. The ultimate failing of the movie is that it was designed first as a cheap and shocking exploitation flick. A product who’s economy opens up a whole other level of critique, if one wished to explore the fundamentals of drive-in first feature productions – which would include the Continental sensibilities of the grindhouse, the speed and inventiveness of the filmmakers, etc.