Night of the Demon

Plot synopsis:
In England, Professor Harrington (Maurice Denham) visits his rival, Dr. Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis). Harrington promises to cancel an investigation of Karswell's involvement in Satanism if Karswell will rescind a threat he has made against Harrington. After learning that a parchment given to Harrington has disintegrated, Karswell glances at the clock and ushers Harrington out, promising to do all that he can. As Harrington drives home, a gigantic demon materialises and pursues him. Losing control of the car, Harrington crashes into an electrical pole and is electrocuted.
Dr. John Holden (Dana Andrews) arrives in England to attend a convention at which Harrington had intended to expose Karswell's cult. Holden is informed of Harrington's death and that the only link between it and Karswell's cult is an accused murderer, Rand Hobart (Brian Wilde), who has fallen into a catatonic stupor. While Harrington's collaborators consider the possibility of supernatural forces, Holden rejects the idea as superstition.
Following Harrington's notes, Holden visits the British Museum's library to examine books on witchcraft. A book Holden requests is discovered to be missing. Karswell offers to show Holden his own copy at his mansion. At Harrington's funeral, Holden meets the dead man's niece, Joanna (Peggy Cummins), who gives him Harrington's diary. It reveals Harrington's increasing fear of Karswell's power. Holden remains sceptical, but goes with Joanna to Karswell's mansion the next day.
There, Holden and Karswell mock each other's beliefs. A very strong windstorm abruptly starts, which Karswell claims to have created with a spell. When Holden continues to mock him, Karswell grows angry and predicts that Holden will die in three days.
Holden and his colleagues discuss Karswell and make plans to further examine Rand Hobart. Harrington's diary mentions the parchment passed to him by Karswell; Holden finds a parchment with runic inscriptions that Karswell secretly passed to him at the library. Powerful winds come through the window, blowing the parchment from his fingers. It nearly burns in the fireplace before Holden rescues and pockets it.
Holden begins to feel more uneasy after a visit to Hobart's family. As Holden leaves, the parchment flies from his hand again. Hobart's family become fearful and declare Holden to be "chosen". Holden compares the parchment's runes to ones inscribed on the nearby stone circle at Stonehenge.
Joanna takes Holden to Karswell's mother (Athene Seyler), who has arranged a séance. The medium channels Harrington, who tells them that Karswell has the key to the problem from his book. That night, Holden breaks into Karswell's mansion to examine the book. He is caught by Karswell, but is permitted to leave. Holden leaves through the woods and is chased by a ball of smoke. On exiting the forest, Holden finds that the phenomenon has vanished. He reports the event to the police, but feels embarrassed.
Mrs. Karswell telephones Joanna, imploring her to tell Holden that Rand Hobart knows the secret of the parchment. While Holden prepares an experiment to break Hobart's stupor, Karswell kidnaps Joanna to prevent her from giving Holden the message.
Under hypnosis, Hobart reveals that he was "chosen" to die by having a parchment with a curse passed to him, but avoided death by passing it along to another person. When Holden shows Hobart the parchment he received from Karswell, Hobart goes berserk and throws himself from a window to his death.
Informed that Karswell is leaving London by train, Holden races to catch it. He finds Karswell with Joanna. Karswell avoids any contact with Holden to guard against the parchment being passed back to him and grows increasingly fearful. When the train stops at the next station, Karswell tries to leave, but Holden manages to sneak the parchment into his coat. Karswell becomes frightened when he realises this. When the parchment flies from his hands, he chases it down to the tracks, but the parchment burns up. As an oncoming train approaches, a demon appears above it, seizes Karswell, slashes him, and tosses his body onto the tracks. The station crew find his mangled, smoking corpse and believe that he was struck by the train.

Tags: violence, murder, sadist, flashback

Review:
They find a backwoods woman who had a child with this creature (actually a somewhat interesting subplot) and end up trapped in her house when the Bigfoot finally attacks the hapless campers.Lots of blood.
Night of the Demon boasts some of the most atrocious production values in the scenes with it's human characters - yet this somehow adds to the reality of the sequences featuring Bigfoot - enhancing it in an almost documentary cinema verite sort of way.
Unintentionally hilarious at times, gruesome at others, Night of the Demon even manages to be slightly chilling in some moments.Night of the Demon features all the things that make cheesy horror great: bad acting, slimy gore, gratuitous nudity, and BIGFOOT!
Lots of gore, bad acting, some nudity, a bigfoot/humanoid baby and the low budget makes this an enjoyable viewing treat for all drive-in movie/ bigfoot fans!!
"Legend of Boggy Creek" will always be #1 to this Bigfoot fan, but "Night of the Demon" is the Bigfoot film genre's "weird uncle that nobody likes to talk about".
I swear her screams sounded like she was having an orgasm.Bigfoot grabs another camper, still in his sleeping bag, and twirls him round and round before throwing him into a tree with a broken branch.You might want to watch where you whip it out to relieve yourself.
There's also a bizarre sub-plot involving a disturbed woman, who as a child, was raped by the monster; had his baby and was then forced to kill it by her father!A crazy, gory, cheesy B-movie that is worth at least a rental..
Another film that is something like an urban legend: being banned in countries like Germany or Norway and also very hard to find the reputation of "Night of the Demon" is much more interesting than the movie itself!The story is simple: a professor and some students travel to the dark forests to investigate some cruel murders which were caused by a Bigfoot-like monster that looks like Chewbacca from "Star Wars".
And also people who like priceless trash should check it out, because "Night of the Demon" is well-done for a movie which was shot without any money!
O.o For some reason, this part of the movie feels like you're no longer in the year 1980, but more like the late 1800's- early 1900's...Then Bigfoot comes and rapes Wanda!
The action opens at a hospital,where a bunch of doctors and a cop are talking to this guy with a cloth over his face to cover his hideous injuries.Apparently he's the only survivor of a recent massacre and the cop wants to know what happened.The guy on the hospital bed is a Professor Nugent from the local college and he tells of how he'd got interested in recent reports coming from the mountains-reports of bizarre murders linked with Bigfoot sightings.Intrigued he assembles a search party of willing nubile students to go with him and hunt for this Yeti.They go looking and the bloodbath ensues..."Night of the Demon" was originally banned in the UK,Germany and Norway due to its gore content.Sure,it offers lots of violence and gore including a notorious scene where a motorcyclist gets his penis graphically ripped off while urinating,but some of the murder scenes are downright hilarious.The film does have more than twice as many deaths as your average body-count flick.Overall,"Night of the Demon" is well made with reasonable acting,a competent storyline and an interesting monster.Give it a look..
This movie is surprisingly much more gory than I was expecting, but mixed with at times passable acting and kills that seem to bring more laughter than fear this Bigfoot horror movie falls flat on its back.
It started as a cool bad movie, it was so bad it became funny and had some small gore in it but when i kept watching it became worse every minute and at one point it just wasn't 'that' funny anymore but rather a chore to make it till the end..The gore was the reason i watched the movie and don't get me wrong, i love bad cheesy horror movies, but this was just painfully bad and i was kinda disappointed in the gore there was just to much talk and too little gore.Making long story short: Gore was disappointing and didn't made up for the terrible acting/story/movie..
this old time classic is the most gory an scary big foot movie of them all, professor Nugent and his motley gang are looking in the deep dark woods for the yeti.
Read on.Night of the Demon is about Professor Nugent, who travels to a secluded area of woods accompanied by a couple of his students and friends.
But if you enjoy cheese in your movies, or if you like bigfoot/slasher/gore flicks, I'd say give this baby a look.
In this low budget gore film, there are some significantly gruesome dismemberment and bloodletting - in one scene a motorcyclist has his penis ripped off whilst taking a leak at the roadside.Night of the Demon is practically a slasher film (prevalent in the horror market at the time), in its approach of the infamous myth of the Bigfoot - or Sasquatch.
In the opening a man has his arm ripped off by the monster, the camera zooms onto the stump at the shoulder, the blood pours out, and as the title, Night of the Demon, emblazons the screen, the blood has filled a foot print in the mud of Bigfoot.
This incredible scene has the editing spirit of the shower scene from psycho, and cuts in some very gut churning shots of knife penetration.Night of the Demon does have a few accomplished moments, but the film is generally a very haphazard production, with lamentable narrative drag, and incompetent performances (but it's preposterous to even criticise acting abilities in films like this).
Of course, as you would expect also, from low budget horror, the monster - man in a suit - is stupid, looking like Chewbacca with a shaved face and an afro, and they save that beautiful reveal (sic) for the climax of the film.
Watching Night of the Demon is like attending a horror reunion filled with parts that were 'borrowed' from hkkthe more popular films released from the mid-seventies to when this hit the shelves.
An anthropology professor and his students travel to a wooded, mountainous area where a huge creature has been attacking and killing anyone he can get his hairy, over-sized hands on.The first time I saw Night of the Demon was during the dark days of the 'Video Nasty', on an nth generation bootleg tape that was fuzzier than a drunken caterpillar wearing an Angora sweater.
Still, I was just thankful that the gore was intact (unlike the recent R2 DVD release, which has been cut by 1:41s, and is still crap quality), because without the splatter, this film would be about as much fun as having your Johnson ripped off by a Sasquatch (my advice: go R1 or take advantage of the wonders of modern technology to get your paws on the uncut version).A predictable script chock full of dull dialogue, crappy acting, and shoddy production values make this one hard to endure at times, but regular doses of cheesy, bargain-basement gore certainly help to relieve the boredom: the pre-credits sequence sees a man have his arm torn off; a couple in van are attacked mid-shag (a scene that nicely ticks the gratuitous nudity box in the process); a man in a sleeping bag is impaled on a broken branch; a motorcyclist stops for a pee and has his wedding tackle torn off; a woodsman is given the chop with his own axe; two knife-wielding girl scouts are made to slash each other to death; and one of the students is bashed into a tree, causing him to accidentally blast himself in the head with his shotgun.
We are also treated to a touch of big-foot rape and the resultant birth of a mutated baby!This all brings us very nicely to the film's 'pièce de résistance', a brutal all-out attack by the monster in which all but one of the group are killed (the sole survivor just has his face seared on a red-hot griddle!).
During this protracted wholesale slaughter, the beast throttles a girl to death, pushes one guy's neck onto a broken pane of glass, and slices another's stomach open on a saw before yanking out his guts and swinging them triumphantly through the air.All this trashy graphic violence might not be sophisticated stuff, but it sure is fun, and earns the otherwise dreadful Night of the Demon a reasonable rating of 5.5 out 10 (rounded up to 6 for IMDb)..
I loved the start of the movie, feel liked the first kill in the movie and how they way victim blood fliled the big foot print was really clever, There were some very funny deaths scenes in this that maybe me laugh out loud, some of the scenes do look a little out dated now.
Night of the Demon (1980)** 1/2 (out of 4) I'm not going to lie and try to pass this thing off as some sort of masterpiece but it's certainly one of the all-time campy horror movies.
If you're looking for a well-made, brilliantly acted, heartfelt film that makes you think when it's over then NIGHT OF THE DEMON certainly isn't for you.
He may have a thankless job here of portraying a grunting and snarling beast that yearns for blood but he is very lissome with his movement and he plays the creature very effectively.Night of the Demon is not one of the great horror films of our time.
James C.Wasson's NIGHT OF THE DEMON is a strangely entertaining, even compelling (if it hits you in the right frame of mind) slice of zero-budget horror that certainly delivers the goods if you're looking for mean-spirited, violent thrills and spills.
Indeed, Wasson constructs his bloody tale with something approaching subtlety - given that the opening scene shows a bandaged man lying in a hospital bed being quizzed by the police about some missing students, it won't take a genius to work out that something bad's going to happen (and indeed already has) - and en route to the denouement, Wasson throws us plenty of juicy tidbits including Bigfoot's previous victims, a bizarre backwoods cult, religious mania, inter-species rape and even patricide.
This marvelously tasteless and trashy low-budget horror splatterfest compensates for what it lacks in pacing, acting, writing, direction and basic narrative coherence (the incredibly ramshackle and episodic mess of a story unfolds in an awkward and confusing flashbacks-inside-of-flashbacks elliptical manner) with a terrifically teeming and uninhibited surplus of outrageous nutty touches, hideously graphic gore set pieces, and good old fashioned bottom-of-the-barrel grindhouse exploitation brazenness.A dippy college professor and an entourage of students go trekking into the North American wilderness to confirm local stories about a girl who allegedly got knocked up by Bigfoot and had his half-man, half-beast bastard offspring.
Wasson enthusiastically pours on the nauseatingly explicit grue by the gleeful bucketful: one hapless hick has his arm torn right out of its socket (the stump bleeds over the opening credits!), two libidinous teens doing just what you think in a parked van are rudely disrupted by Bigfoot, who proceeds to paint the van's windshield a saucy red with the amorous guy's blood; two girl scouts accidentally stab each other to death, intestines are yanked out and waved in the air, a man dozing in a sleeping bag gets impaled while hanging upside down on a tree branch, the professor's face gets severely burned up after he's pressed against a hot stove, and, undoubtedly the picture's wince-inducing splatter highlight, an unfortunate biker winds up being brutally castrated (ouch!) after he makes the fatal error of picking the wrong tree to do his business behind.
Expect lots of gust, blood, stabbings, a head crushed, a man stabbed with a broken window, a scene where a couple after having sex is killed off screen (HORRIBLE acting by the woman by the way), and my favorite, a biker getting castrated.
This unknown monster flick is a story about an anthropology professor who takes a group of his students and goes deep in the woods to find out truth about BigFoot.
When the lawman asks for his description of the events that left him so severely disfigured, he kicks it all of with the cheesily intriguing build up, `Those horror stories that you heard about the forest.they're all true!' So begins the flashback that will narrate us through his gore-laden adventure.Apparently, the man without a face (heh, no pun intended!) is Bill Nugent, an anthropology lecturer (a popular career amongst slasher alumni, I'm sure you'll agree), that you could say is somewhat obsessed with uncovering the truth behind the legend of the murderous Big Foot.
When the lawman asks for his description of the events that left him so severely disfigured, he kicks it all of with the cheesily intriguing build up, `Those horror stories that you heard about the forest.they're all true!' So begins the flashback that will narrate us through his gore-laden adventure.Apparently, the man without a face (heh, no pun intended!) is Bill Nugent, an anthropology lecturer (a popular career amongst slasher alumni, I'm sure you'll agree), that you could say is somewhat obsessed with uncovering the truth behind the legend of the murderous Big Foot.
He expresses his apparent distaste that they've come traipsing into his area without direct permission, by surrounding and then violently murdering them one by one, in one of the goriest final scenes in the whole history of splatter flicks!Watching Night of the Demon is like attending a horror reunion filled with parts that were 'borrowed' out of all the more popular films released from the mid-seventies to when this hit the shelves.
The film starts with a giallo-style framing device, where several policemen are interviewing Professor Bill Nugent, an anthropology teacher who was found in the woods with his face mutilated, surrounded by the bodies of his dead students.This is a film of unconnected narratives, where one character after another appears to tell a story about Bigfoot, then that story is reenacted.
NIGHT OF THE DEMON is another such movie, yet despite gobbets of bloody gore and gristle, the resulting story is so ineptly played out that only the most ardent horror-lovers will find themselves having a good time.
More of a film to laugh at than actually be scared by, NIGHT OF THE DEMON is a cheesy and badly-made nightmare of a movie..
"Like A Bad Student Film About Bigfoot!".
This is like a bad student film about Bigfoot that I only give points for it's nice surroundings and bloody effects.
Professor Nugent takes a group of students into the woods to check out the Bigfoot creature that may be behind the carnage.
A 'young girl', who looks about 40, is getting it on with her hairy-arsed boyfriend in the back of a van when Bigfoot comes along, pulls the guy out the van and proceeds to kill him on the roof before draping him over the front window, whereupon the director cuts back and forth between nude woman screaming and man bleeding all over windshield.
Casting her out of the house for the night, Bigfoot wanders (geddit) out of the woods and rapes Wanda in such a cheesy way that it's only surpassed by the great death scenes I'm a-keeping for the end of this review.
As the students bed down for the night, for some reason the film cuts away to a guy roughing it in the woods during the day.
A few years ago my mother had bought me a DVD called Night of the Demon out of the 5 dollar bin, she knew my love of horror films and thought that the cover looked cool and that I would probably like it.
Night of the Demon does that for me, while the story, acting and directing isn't up to par, this is a fun movie with the killing scenes.
Along the way, the team learn about the creature's previous victims, uncover the squalid story of a hermit who gave birth to a mutation after being raped by the monster, and finally come face to face with the beast himself.Eighty dollars worth of your time; no, not really, but if you're able to still find it cheap and are a horror fan like I am, I totally recommend this film.
This is a crazy monster we have in the film, we go from this light hearted music that sounds like it belongs in an elevator to seeing Big Foot rip a guys hot dog off!
*END OF SPOILERS* "Night Of The Demon"  is very gory; in fact it's one of the goriest film of the 80's slasher glory.
one of the worst horror films ever made has laughable dialog and laughable acting.It has some nice scenery lots of love scenes but this just seems to be an excuse for throwing a bunch of extreme gore to the mix no don't get me wrong i love gore but it' so fake and amateurish that it is unbearble to watch there is a cool opening death scene where a guy gets his arm slashed off and they are all bizarre murders this has bad direction and on top of that i almost fell asleep it was so boring and the characters are a bunch of idiots and not one is likable overall one of the worst movies i have ever seen AVOID!!!!!!!!!!
I just love how Wasson manages to pile on the gore by showing lots of deaths in flashbacks, Night of the Demon contains a lot of good kills & some surprisingly explicit gore scenes.
I'm not sure who I can recommend Night of the Demon too, none of the people I know would like it but what the hell if you can find a copy & are interested in gory horror then give it a whirl.