The Demon / Midnight Caller (1979/1985) *½
It feels very strange to accuse someone of failing to understand Halloween, of all movies, but that is indeed the position in which I find myself thanks to The Demon. This South African import is the most purely baffling slasher movie I’ve seen since Scream, and much of what makes it so is producer/writer/director Percival Rubens’s habit of copying elements from Halloween without any apparent appreciation for the purposes or functions to which John Carpenter originally put them. That’s strange not only because Halloween seems so transparent, but also because Rubens was one of the few Carpenter copyists to recognize that Carpenter himself had been consciously riffing on Dario Argento’s early gialli. The Demon, you see, also cribs from the Argento playbook, and it revealingly does so in ways that Halloween did not. Unfortunately, Rubens shares none of the directorial virtues possessed by either of his models, and far too many of Argento’s authorial vices.
If The Demon strikes you as a peculiar title for a slasher movie, consider that its villain (Graham Kennard) is a very peculiar slasher. To begin with, he is as nameless and inscrutable as the killer phone freak in Black Christmas, with no discernable motive beyond sheer, indiscriminate misogyny. Also reminiscent of Black Christmas is his modus operandi, for although the killer has outfitted the fingertips of his giallo-standard black leather gloves with homemade steel claws, he prefers to asphyxiate his victims by wrapping their heads in polyethylene bags. The claws are too short to inflict lethal wounds anyway, and serve mainly to shred the victims’ clothes either during or after their fatal envelopment. The killer wears a featureless rubber mask not dissimilar to those favored by Michael Myers, but this one seems inexplicably to merge with his face whenever he puts it on; on those rare occasions when we see Kennard clearly during an attack, he’s plainly just wearing a coat of white greasepaint. And although slasher movie maniacs have a long-established habit of disregarding physics when it’s convenient to a jump scare, this one does so onscreen— albeit only in ways that are susceptible to being read as an artsy affectation on Rubens’s part, rather than as overt displays of supernatural power on the killer’s. Still, it’s here that The Demon most closely resembles Halloween, but whereas Carpenter used the ambiguity of Michael’s nature as part of a broader thematic engagement with the primal terror of truly senseless violence, Rubens seems to have no thought in his mind beyond that copying Carpenter’s tricks might equate to duplicating his profits as well.
Anyway, the first we see of this strange Myers wannabe is when he invades the home of the Parker family while Mr. Parker (Peter J. Elliott, from Snake Dancer and 1000 Convicts and a Woman) is out on some nocturnal errand. The killer strikes Parker’s wife, Joan (Moira Winslow), first, but merely leaves her gasping for breath inside her plastic bag while he moves on to his real target. Rather than slaying the 20-ish Emily Parker (Ashleigh Sendin) on the spot, however, he incapacitates her much as he did her mother, and absconds with her to parts unknown. The girl’s parents quickly develop very different understandings of what happened that night, as they try in the aftermath to goad the authorities into productive action. Joan clings tenaciously to the hope that Emily is still alive, and that any hunt for the man who took her will therefore have the character of a rescue mission. Her husband, however, pessimistically concludes that no solace remains but the possibility of vengeance against Emily’s killer.
That’s still where the Parkers’ respective heads are at when they receive an unexpected visit from Colonel Bill Carson (Cameron Mitchell, of Without Warning and Blood and Black Lace). Carson retired from the army years ago, and now acts as a tracer of lost persons. Obviously the toughness, self-discipline, and courage under pressure instilled by his military background all come in handy in his current line of work, but the true secret to Carson’s success is his psychic clairvoyance. And although the Parkers would be willing at this point to pay handsomely for any progress in locating either Emily or her abductor, Carson promises to tackle their case pro bono. Something about this one got to the colonel on a personal level, and he can’t rest easy until he’s done whatever lies within his power to bring about justice for the missing girl. The Parkers agree to let Carson examine Emily’s bedroom, and as he was hoping, he receives impressions of both victim and perpetrator. The psychic is disturbed, however, that despite the overwhelming strength of those impressions, he is unable to form any image of the attacker’s face, nor can he discern whether Emily is alive or dead. And although Carson doesn’t specify what he means by this, it can’t be good news that the vibes in Emily’s room indicate that they’re dealing with somebody “both more and less than human.”
Meanwhile, a nursery school teacher by the name of Mary (Jennifer Holmes, of Raw Force) keeps catching glimpses of a strange man watching her from a distance, who seems to disappear before her eyes whenever she tries to get a good, potentially identifying look at him. She sees him on the street as she walks around town. He’s outside the store when she shops for clothes. Most alarmingly, she even catches him one morning spying on her at work, where he might pose a threat to her kids as well as to her. We, of course, recognize Mary’s mysterious stalker, but she has no reason to link him specifically to news coverage of the Emily Parker case. Regardless, the stranger’s surveillance probably goes a long way toward explaining Mary’s wary attitude when her flatmate, Jo (Survival Zone’s Zoli Marki), starts talking about wanting to see more of Dean Turner (Craig Gardner, from Short Circuit 2), the rich wastrel with whom she went on a date last week. And in point of fact, Dean forthrightly admits to having Issues stemming from his strained relationship with his father ever since they were both abandoned by his fashion-model mother. Exactly the sort of thing that turns people into Black Glovers and power-tool maniacs, right?
So far, The Demon seems to be setting itself up in fairly predictable parallel with Halloween, albeit with a few added gialloid touches like giving its Dr. Loomis analogue psychic sensitivities and positioning Dean Turner (and maybe even Mary’s boyfriend, Bobby [played by Jennifer Holmes’s Raw Force castmate, Mark Tanous]) as a possible suspect. The natural assumption is that Carson’s search will lead him eventually into contact with Mary— probably just in time for him to rescue her from the killer, since it wouldn’t become normal until the following year for even the most resourceful of horror movie heroines to do their own monster-slaying. But Rubens blows up any such tidy expectation by having Parker lose patience with Carson, deciding that if he wants his vigilante execution done right, he’ll simply have to do it himself. The bereaved father’s hunt for the killer goes off the rails so calamitously that it takes the Parker family’s whole plot thread out of the picture with fully half an hour left on the clock. When Mary finally has to throw down against the killer, the only backup on which she might be able to call is Bobby on the one hand, and her elderly neighbors, Dr. and Mrs. Stuart (George Korelin and Vera Blacker, the latter of The Mangler and Shadowchaser: The Gates of Time) on the other.
Part of what makes The Demon so strange and confusing is that it would honestly have been better if Rubens had allowed it to remain the slavishly derivative Halloween clone that it initially seems. Its one bit of genuine originality— sending Mr. Parker on a kamikaze mission against the killer that cuts short his family’s side of the story at the end of the second act— leaves the rest of the film feeling pointless in a way that’s rare even for bottom-feeding slasher flicks. The problem is that the Parkers and Colonel Carson have no chance to establish a connection between their story and Mary’s before they’re sent packing, beyond the mere brute fact that the same psycho serves as the antagonist in both. Although we spend nearly a third of the running time with the grieving parents and the psychic soldier all told, they end up having no more relevance to the action in the final phase of the film than the random slabs of Expendable Meat who sometimes appear earlier on for the sake of keeping the audience from getting restless without a fresh murder. And then to add insult to injury, The Demon’s one sincerely effective scare scene has nothing to do with Mary or her associates, either. In one of the best “finding the bodies” sequences I’ve ever seen, Emily Parker’s skeletonized corpse is discovered crammed into the crotch of a tree by a group of children at play.
Equally perplexing and misguided is the use to which Rubens puts the two boyfriends. It’s fair enough to plant red herrings in a murder mystery, and equally so in one of those slasher films (think Prom Night or Terror Train) that retain vestiges of the murder-mystery plot template. Sometimes there’s pleasure to be had in trying to guess whodunit even when the real object is just to watch a bunch of gruesome slayings, and a bit of misdirection can make that game more interesting. But The Demon isn’t that kind of slasher. As we’ve already discussed, it takes most of its cues from Halloween, in which the villain’s identity is never in doubt— only The Demon presses on all the way into The Town that Dreaded Sundown’s territory, never giving him a name or a face at all! Why bother trying to trick us into suspecting poor Dean or Bobby when it doesn’t even matter who the fucking killer is?
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