Synapse Films
4K UHD Release: August 13, 2024 (following 2021 LE)
Video: 1.66:1/2160p (HDR10/Dolby Vision)/Color
Audio: English and Italian DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 stereo and 5.1 remix (Italian/international cut); English DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 (US cut)
Subtitles: English, English SDH
Run Time: 88:22 (Italian/international cut), 88:29 (US cut)
Director: Lamberto Bava
Note: While significantly re-written, I am recycling the majority of my older Blu-ray review. If you're only reading this to get my opinion on the new 4K UHD and extras that weren’t available on the standard edition Blu-ray, kindly skip to the Video and Extras sections.
A strange masked man offers tickets to a horror movie sneak preview at the mysterious Metropol cinema. When a patron is accidentally scratched by a prop displayed in the lobby, she transforms into a flesh-ripping demon! One by one, the audience members mutate into horrible creatures hell-bent on destroying the world. Can anyone escape this gory orgy of terror? (From Synapse’s official synopsis)
At the onset of the mid-’80s, Italian horror and thriller cinema was in decline as the entire industry struggled to make ends meet, yet Dario Argento was arguably at the very peak of his worldwide popularity. His already prominent career had evolved to the point that he had become a Steven Spielberg-like brand name. While widely known as a writer/director, he had also been instrumental in ushering George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) through its production and had created the Door into Darkness (Italian: La porta sul buio, 1973) television series, setting the stage for his first role as co-writer and producer of one of his biggest international hits, Demons (Italian: Demoni; aka: Dance of the Demons, 1985), which was directed by his frequent second-unit collaborator Lamberto Bava. Though not credited as second unit or co-director, most of the people involved with the film seem to agree that Argento was still a heavy driving force behind Demons, as he divided his attention (not to mention many crew members) between it and his ninth feature as direct, Phenomena (aka: Creepers, 1985).
Though often relegated to second fiddle status in promotional materials and periodical features, Bava himself was destined to be a major player in the Italian horror/thriller arena simply due to the fact his father, Mario Bava, practically invented the Italian Gothic and giallo genre’s on film. Nevertheless, Lamberto’s first four efforts as a lead director – including a low-key giallo-adjacent thriller Macabro (aka: Macabre, 1980), gory neo-giallo A Blade in the Dark (Italian: La casa con la scala nel buio, 1983), First Blood-inspired action flick Blastfighter (1984), and a notoriously shoddy Jaws rip-off known as Monster Shark (Italian: Shark - Rosso nell'oceano, 1984) – failed to ignite much attention, especially outside of Italy. His latter career in straight-to-video productions and Italian television wasn’t particularly memorable, either, but Demons, and, to a lesser extent, its sequel, briefly rocketed him to the top of internationally popular Italian horror movies, where it ranks just below Argento’s own Suspiria (1977) and Lucio Fulci’s Zombie (Italian: Zombi 2; aka: Zombie Flesh Eaters, 1979) in terms of money made and precedent set.
Despite a stellar degree of horror and giallo output during the ‘70s and early ‘80s, screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti was not part of Argento’s usual cadre of collaborators at the time. He is now best known for his collaborations with Fulci – notably living dead-themed hits Zombie, City of the Living Dead (Italian: Paura nella città dei morti viventi; aka: The Gates of Hell, 1980), and The Beyond (Italian: ...E tu vivrai nel terrore! L'aldilà; aka: Seven Doors of Death, 1981) – but he had also worked with the elder Bava (Bay of Blood [Italian: Ecologia del delitto and Reazione a catena; aka: Twitch of the Death Nerve, 1971] and Shock [aka: Beyond the Door II, 1977]), before hooking up with the junior Bava on three of his four pre-Demons movies (A Blade in the Dark, Blastfighter, and Monster Shark).
According to interviews, at Bava’s behest, Sacchetti’s original script was a three-part portmanteau in the tradition of Bava Sr.’s Black Sabbath (Italian: I tre volti della paura, 1963), but, according to Sacchetti, Argento only really reacted to a story where people were possessed by evil spirits/monsters escaping from a cinema screen. In other interviews, Bava claims that it was his idea to expand the possessed theater story, but, either way, the other two stories were scrapped and a standalone screenplay was developed by Sacchetti, Franco Ferrini (Argento’s go-to co-writer during the era), Bava, and Argento himself. The simplicity of the plot and characters (every person in the theater is defined by a single line of dialogue or, failing that, the clothing they wear) allowed the writers to fill time with increasingly outrageous set-pieces and cinematic references.
For his part, Bava lines up all of his little human dominos and effects artists Rosario Prestopino & Sergio Stivaletti revel in knocking them down with nasty, bubbling, ooey-gooey make-up and practical artistry. Cinematographer Gianlorenzo Battaglia’s (a frequent Bava collaborator that spent most of his career in the shadow of cinematographic stars, like Luciano Tovoli) acrylic, comic book-like photography soaks the over-the-top violence in hyperactive hues, earning consistent comparisons to Argento’s Suspiria and Inferno (1980), not to mention Bava’s Sr.’s influential, early color horror films. The name of this game is excess and Demons never fails to top itself from one outrageous mutilation to the next.
However, Demons is also often devoid of the rhythms and dynamic ranges of the movies it attempts to build on and can become numbing. The last third of the film alternates between gonzo slaughter and boring, repetitive scenes of survivors trying to find yet another way out of the afflicted theater. The pacing problems are compounded by the second-act introduction of coke-addled thugs, who break into the theater to escape the police after spilling their stash. This B-plot was almost certainly added to ensure that the film ran an industry-standard feature length (even then, the final run time is a pithy 88 minutes) and to introduce a then-trendy counterculture kick to the relatively conventional horror tropes (possibly a last-minute inspiration from Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead, which was released earlier the same year). In the end, Sacchetti’s original anthology idea would’ve probably fit the material better, though anthologies weren’t a particularly popular format in the mid-‘80s (George A. Romero’s Creepshow, notwithstanding) and Demons’ box office punch was definitely tied to its very specific heavy metal splatter formula.
Initially, Demons was offered to producer Fabrizio De Angelis, but after learning that he wanted to recycle footage from the Fulci films he already owned to save money on the film-within-the-film, Bava went to Argento (this story backs up the claim that it was Bava’s idea to consolidate the original portmanteau script). In the end, the faux-film was handed over to future Cemetery Man (Italian: Dellamorte Dellamore, 1994) director Michele Soavi, who also plays two roles in Demons – a metal-masked man handing out tickets to the show in the real world and one of the doomed actors in the movie world. Soavi’s mini-movie walks a tight line, being stylish on its own merits, while still appearing amateur enough to work as a silly horror schlock and harmless fodder to contrast Bava’s more hardcore offerings.
Soavi himself had already worked as a second unit director and actor for Bava on Blade in the Dark and Blastfighter, as well as second or third assistant on a few Argento projects. Following Demons 2’s disappointing box office he briefly took over the role of Argento protégé du jour, placing him in the director’s chair for two collaborations: The Church (Italian: La Chiesa, 1989), which began its life as Demons 3, and The Sect (Italian: La Setta, 1991). Both films were sold as Demons sequels in various territories, along with Bava’s Ogre (aka: Demons 3: The Ogre, 1988), his pseudo remake of his father’s Black Sunday (Italian: La maschera del demonio, 1966), titled Mask of Satan (1992), Umberto Lenzi’s Black Demons (Italian: Demoni 3, 1991), Luigi Cozzi’s off-brand Inferno sequel, The Black Cat (Italian: Il gatto nero; aka: Demons 6: De Profundis, 1989), and even Cemetery Man.
Bibliography:
Profondo Argento: The Man, The Myths And The Magic by Alan Jones (FAB Press, 2004)
Spaghetti Nightmares: Italian Fantasy-Horrors As Seen Through the Eyes of Their Protagonists by Luca M. Palmerini & Gaetano Mistretta (Fantasma Books, 1996)
Italian Gothic Horror Films, 1980-1989 by Roberto Curti (McFarland & Company, 2019)
Video
A solid world-wide hit on VHS, Demons first appeared on DVD courtesy of Anchor Bay Studios’ non-anamorphic, 1.63:1 disc. Following a number of other non-anamorphic releases from other territories, Anchor Bay put out an anamorphic, 1.66:1 disc in 2007. Arrow UK released the first Blu-ray version in 2012, followed in 2013 by Synapse Films, who first made it available only as a limited edition Steelbook, before issuing a barebones variant later. Arrow and Synapse then debut their own 4K UHD versions in 2021 as limited edition, two-film collections that combined Demons and Demons 2. This review pertains to the new 2024 standard edition, single-movie 4K reissue.
From what I understand (and I could be mistaken), Synapse and Arrow’s Blu-rays and UHDs were created using the same restoration of “original vault materials,” though the companies didn’t collaborate directly as they did for the collector’s editions of Phenomena and Tenebrae (aka: Unsane, 1982) (edit: according to a social media post, the two companies did, in fact, collaborate). I don’t have the Arrow collection on hand for a direct comparison, but trustworthy sources indicate that the transfers are basically identical. The images on this page are taken from Synapse’s earlier Blu-ray, which illustrate the basic look of the film, but aren’t really indicative of its improvements.
The extra resolution boosts detail and tightens edges without overloading sharpness levels, but I think the better improvement is seen in the grain and other textures. The image quality is consistent, despite huge shifts in color and style, and everything appears authentically film-like, thanks to gentle noise reduction. The 4K master is darker than the Blu-ray, which was already darker than the previous DVDs. This time, the darkness is largely in service of the Dolby Vision HDR upgrade, leading to richer blacks, but also less smudgy grey mud within the darker shadows. The color timing also differs from the Blu-ray, though not in a consistent manner that implies they just turned a few knobs and called it a day. I think it’s an improvement across the board – the neutral scenes skew a tad cooler, yellows are a little more orange, and heavily gelled sequences (usually red or blue) are more vivid than their 1080p counterpart.
Note that there are two cuts available on this disc – the original Italian cut and the slightly different US theatrical cut. Both versions are visually comparable.
Audio
At the time, Italian genre films were largely shot without sound and dubbed into various languages for various markets. By the ‘80s, English had become the default dub. However, in the case of Demons, the US distributors Ascot Films made their own mix for theatrical and video releases. For this UHD, Synapse is recycling the Blu-ray’s remastered 2.0 Italian and international English dubs, the 5.1 remixes of both dubs, and the US English dub, which is 1.0, all in uncompressed DTS-HD Master Audio.
The international English 2.0 dub was mixed for Dolby theater systems and is, in my opinion, the best option. As per usual, the film was shot without sound, so all tracks are dubbed, but a lot of the cast is speaking English on set and some even dubbed their own performances (for the record, the Italian 2.0 dub is very similar sound-wise). The 2.0 mix has a better directional spread than the sloppy 5.1 remix, the dialogue is clear and effectively centered in the non-discrete middle channel, and the lack of compression helps keep the levels dynamic without leveling out or distorting at the higher volume samples. The film is still limited in terms of effects work (demon growls, mostly), but the musical tracks have never sounded better. Goblin keyboardist Claudio Simonetti provided the majority of Demons’ music (while also contributing to Phenomena’s multi-composer score), but the US ad campaigns were more excited to trumpet the inclusion of heavy metal and pop songs from Mötley Crüe, Rick Springfield, Billy Idol, Accept, and Go West.
US dub doesn’t feature different English language performances – the key distinctions are the mood music and additional effects between action scenes and big scares. While all dubs maintain Simonetti’s major cues and the various rock tracks, the US dub adds more mood music during the quieter sequences. I can’t find any additional musical credits for the film, so either these were taken from Simonetti’s outtakes or some poor sap did them without recognition. Fans who discovered the film via New World Home Video’s VHS release should be very pleased with the ace treatment of the mono track, though the international stereo track is the superior aural experience.
Extras
Commentary with critics Kat Ellinger and Heather Drain – This track with the co-hosts of the Hell's Belles podcast was recorded specifically for use with both Synapse and Arrow’s 4K releases. Ellinger and Drain explore the state of Italian horror in the 1980s, Lamberto Bava’s place in the Italian horror canon, the wider careers of the cast & crew, the making of and release of the film, the idea of self-aware horror, the made and unmade sequels, and various in-jokes, influences, and references,
Commentary with Lamberto Bava, special effects artist Sergio Stivaletti, composer Claudio Simonetti, and actress Geretta Geretta (in Italian with English subtitles) – This classic, star-studded 2012 track is moderated by Paura: Lucio Fulci Remembered - Volume 1 (2008) producer Mike Baronas, editor of Ultra Violent magazine (and practicing attorney) Art Ettinger, and Mark Murray (whose name is too common to Google his CV). It originally debuted with Arrow’s 2012 Blu-ray and was included exclusively on Synapse's limited edition disc. It’s a busy track, but still quite informative, because the anecdotes are being told from varying sides of the production (i.e. directing, acting, effects, and music).
Produced by Dario Argento (27:13, 4K) – In this 2021 visual essay, critic, author, and prolific Blu-ray producer Michael Mackenzie looks back on Argento’s work as producer and presenter, including Door into Darkness, Dawn of the Dead, the two Demons films, The Church, The Sect, as well as the films made under his own production companies, DACFILM and Opera Film. The featurette also covers Argento’s relationship with his father Salvatore (his original producer), brother Claudio (a consistent collaborator), Lamberto Bava, and Michele Soavi.
Archival extras
Dario’s Demon Days (10:30, HD) – A 2012 interview with Argento about the making of Demons and Demons 2.
Defining an Era in Music (9:34, HD) – A 2012 interview with composer Claudio Simonetti concerning his contributions to the Demons soundtrack.
Splatter Spaghetti Style (11:27, SD) – Long-time Argento collaborator Luigi Cozzi’s top ten Italian horror movies.
Carnage at the Cinema: Lamberto Bava and His Splatter Masterpiece (36:01, HD) – An extended interview with Bava about the making of the film that helps fill in some of the details missing from older print interviews with the director.
Dario and His Demons: Producing Monster Mayhem (15:51, HD) – Another discussion with Argento, this one recorded in 2013.
Monstrous Memories: Luigi Cozzi on Demons (30:18, HD) – Cozzi gives us his perspective as all-around assistant and second unit man.
Profondo Jones: The Critical Perspective (17:39, HD) – Writer, critic, and author of Profondo Argento: The Man, The Myths And The Magic (FAB Press, 2004) Alan Jones offers additional behind-the-scenes context.
Splatter Stunt Rock (9:12, HD) – Stuntman Ottaviano Dell’Acqua wraps things up with a look back on his career and work on Demons.
Claudio Stivaletti Q&A at The Festival of Fantastic Films (36:13) – Recorded in Manchester, England on October 25th, 2019 and moderated by Michelangelo Stivaletti & Calum Waddell
Italian trailer, international English trailer, US trailer
The images on this page are taken from Synapse’s BD – NOT the 4K UHD – and sized for the page. Larger versions can be viewed by clicking the images. Note that there will be some JPG compression.
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