To celebrate spooky season, Gar O’Brien-Collins shoots the breeze with this classic horror.
A perennial fixture on both cult ’80s horror* and “films so bad they’re good” lists, Charles Philip Moore’s debut feature Demon Wind initially seems like a passable, if distinctly by-the-numbers, Evil Dead clone. Just when audiences appear able to predict every beat and blood-splattered killing, however, Moore and his team take a series of hard left turns into territory that straddles the knife-edge between genuinely inventive and utterly insane. It’s bold, baffling, and not always successful, but boy, is it entertaining.
Things start strongly with a flashback to 1931: a close-up of a body burning on a cross, followed by the interior of a house with way too many candles and somehow even more pictures of Jesus. Crucifixes decorate the walls, while the floors are covered with a jumble of Judaeo-Christian symbols. Yep, it sure looks like someone is trying to keep out the devil. Suddenly, something starts ramming the door and knocking the windows, and an elderly woman named Regina (Stella Kastner) screams unconvincingly, urging the unseen entity to go away. Somehow, this works. Except, of course, then it doesn’t. Her husband George (Axel Toowey) appears, frothing at the mouth, his skin red and bubbling, and his voice doing that barely decipherable vocoder thing that usually means one thing in ’80s horror: he’s possessed. Well, that, or he is suffering from extreme allergies. The admittedly impressive and gross make-up is not necessarily possession-coded. He kills his wife, and we promptly jump forward to 1989.
Here we meet a young man named Cory (Eric Larson) miserably driving one of those compact jeeps that were all the rage in the ’80s. Following the suicide of his father, Cory, the grandson of the dearly departed Regina and George, and his girlfriend Elaine (Francine Lapensée) are going to the old house along with a group of their friends. Well, one assumes she’s his girlfriend – Cory doesn’t seem to like her that much. They hope to unlock the mystery of what happened in 1931. This can only end well.
The friend group is delightfully made up of all the usual subjects: a deeply problematic - even for the time - jock, a nerd, or some kind of double-majoring Latin-and-maths whizz who looks like a non-union, bargain-basement Judd Nelson; and their respective girlfriends, who occupy opposite ends of the reductive ’80s B-horror spectrum, from oversexed to hysterically prudish. They meet at a gas station (uh-oh!) and, before you know it, they’re ignoring the warnings of a grizzled old man with a face like quarried stone. He tells them that nothing good can come of going to the farm and that, if they do, they will DOOM US ALL (double uh-oh!).
At this point, it feels like someone has tried to reverse-engineer a Cabin in the Woods film, having only seen the wonderful postmodern cinematic inversion of the trope in the movie of the same name, and heard a half-remembered summary from someone who saw the first half of Evil Dead once in the early ’80s while stoned.
In fact, such is its obvious debt to Sam Raimi’s classic that it appears destined to join the canon of laughably bad but (occasionally) endearingly demented horror rip-offs alongside Ghoulies (1982) and Hobgoblins (1988) (both heavily indebted to Joe Dante’s Gremlins); Galaxy of Terror (1981) and Nightbeast (1982) (Ridley Scott’s Alien); and a whole slew of increasingly bizarre Italian Evil Dead knock-offs, including the crass Evil Clutch and the incoherent and brazenly unrelated La Casa sequels (La Casa being the name given to Evil Dead by Italian distributors who figured, “Hey, why not repackage these terrible sequels to other films as sequels to that?” and somehow ends up being less exploitative than Evil Clutch).
Frankly, it’s veering towards “why don’t they just call it The Maleficent Deceased or be done with it” territory. But then two things happen. The first comes when Elaine, trying to cheer up the perpetually grumpy, proto-emo Cory, flashes her bum at him in the diner attached to the gas station. This does not have the desired effect. Cory glumly responds: “A moon for the misbegotten.” It’s one of those baffling non sequiturs that becomes endlessly memorable precisely because it makes so little sense. I hope it’s not spoiling anything to say that neither the play, its themes, nor any other Eugene O’Neill work is invoked again. Still, it’s the kind of dumb-clever line that makes you want your friends to watch the film just so you can quote it at them. It’s a step towards the promised fun, though you soon worry it was a one-off aberration.
But then, the karate magician shows up.
As the group leave the gas station, a convertible appears on the horizon. Standing with his hands on the windscreen, wearing a red, velvet-lined, black magician’s cape, and listening to a surprisingly great synth-rock version of Ride of the Valkyries, is Chuck. This is an impressive enough entrance, but soon Chuck is roundhouse-kicking his way towards our jock friend (who is now dating Chuck’s ex) before deciding that violence is not the answer and instead electing to conjure a dove out of thin air (or, more accurately, a puff of smoke). The dove has seemingly been trained to relieve itself on problematic, girlfriend-stealing jocks, and with that, Chuck and his assistant/best friend Jack are away just as fantastically as they arrived. It is at this point that one imagines audiences sitting forward in their seats, suddenly realising that they are watching something special. And they’d be right.
The film kicks into overdrive after this, and soon we are treated to a lucky dip of escalating genre absurdities, a relentless cascade as demented as it is delightful: a trio of identical little girls electrify people (via delightful 2D animation), which has the natural effect of turning them into bloody, battered, inanimate children’s dolls; an effigy of Satan (actually just a skeleton in a barn with a goat skull on top) lashes a grotesquely elongated tongue out to grab an unsuspecting victim before chomping on their head; a shotgun karate fight with zombies breaks out, with Chuck (sadly de-caped but rocking the double denim) and his wisecracking buddy Jack fighting back to back and trading preposterous one-liners; and a dagger that de-ages its victims to children, then babies, and then, naturally, a dove before they disappear in a flash of lightning. Oh, and all the monsters bleed custard for some reason.
It’s honestly great, goofy fun, and it’s to the credit of Moore and his team that the level of daft inventiveness is often born from limitations behind the scenes. A prime example of this is when our heroes reach the farmhouse only to find that all that is left is a door frame and a series of collapsed walls. “How do you have a cabin-in-the-woods film without the cabin?” you might ask, and it’s a fair question, but one that Moore has a pretty brilliant answer to.
Moore was previously assistant director on the moderately successful Twisted Nightmare. Paul Hunt, the director of that film, and his producers were impressed enough by Moore to ask if he had any ideas knocking around for a horror film that they could turn around quickly and that could use the same sets and locations from Twisted Nightmare. This was the seed for Demon Wind, and it was swiftly greenlit. But with principal photography fast approaching, the team discovered that the cost of the locations had increased drastically. With no location secured and cameras ready to roll, Moore came up with a workaround whereby they would instead use only a standing door frame and some pieces of wood to represent the ruined walls of the house after it was exploded by Satan in 1931 (I’m pretty sure this is what happened, at least. The same explosion is shown at least twice). Then, in the present, our protagonists enter through this door frame and are transported to the interior of the house as it existed in 1931 (and safely and cheaply back onto a set/some high school gymnasium) by way of “dark magic”. It’s a cool, fun effect that adds to the film and the lore instead of detracting from it. It’s exactly this spirit that, alongside the superb Carpenter-aping synth score, carries the film through some disjointed storytelling and a rather mixed bag of acting abilities.
Before the credits roll, the bodies of our slain protagonists (and assorted other fodder) have risen from the dead and force the survivors back into the cabin, where they must battle Satan himself. Satan, it should be added, shows up and promptly decides to grope one of our female protagonists. He is the source of all evil, true, but it still seems gratuitous and cheap, even for a film from the late ’80s. But at least he won’t get away with it, as one of our heroes can go toe to toe with the dark lord, as he has helpfully transformed into a demon, or possibly an angel, or maybe it’s an alien, or one of the weird things from Tool’s music videos in the early noughties? It’s hard to tell, and the distorted Satan vocals make it hard to work out what’s going on. But it doesn’t matter. The chaos is all part of the charm.
Demon Wind has its flaws, for sure, but they are ultimately outweighed by everything else. It is a film for watching in groups and is that most welcome of beasts: a cult classic you watch thinking it’ll be so bad it’s good, but that ends up charming you with its sheer, unbridled creativity. There are many films that do exactly what Demon Seed does, but there are very few that do it with as much demented, single-minded gusto.
* Demon Wind was released in 1990 but was filmed in 1989, so I think we can include it.
Demon Wind is available to stream online. Check out our full countdown of Halloween Horror here.
