Demons (Dèmoni)

Demons (Italian: Dèmoni) is a 1985 Italian supernatural horror film directed by Lamberto Bava and produced by Dario Argento, and starring Urbano Barberini and Natasha Hovey. The plot follows two female university students who, along with a number of random people, are given complimentary tickets to a mysterious movie screening, where they soon find themselves trapped in the theater with a horde of ravenous demons.

On the Berlin subway, a mysterious, masked man offers University student Cheryl two tickets to a free screening at the Metropol, an isolated and recently renovated local cinema. Cheryl talks her friend Kathy into going with her; at the theater, they meet two college boys, George and Ken. Other attendees of the screening include a blind man and his guide daughter; a married couple; a boyfriend and girlfriend; and a pimp named Tony along with his two prostitutes. One of the prostitutes, Rosemary, accidentally scratches her face with a bizarre mask that is on display in the lobby. The film being shown is a violent, disturbing horror film about four teenagers who discover an old tomb and dig up the grave of the sixteenth-century fortune-teller Nostradamus. When the teenagers dig up Nostradamus’s coffin, they find no body and instead an old book and a mask, identical to the strange mask in the lobby. When one of the movie’s characters puts the mask on and is scratched by it just like Rosemary was by its doppelganger, he then turns evil and slaughters his friends.

With her scratch still bleeding, Rosemary goes to the bathroom, where she transforms into a bloodthirsty, red-eyed demon similar to the one in the film. Rosemary attacks her friend, Gina, who then transforms into a demon in front of the rest of the cinemagoers. The group of uninfected people race to the exits, only to find that they have all been bricked up, making escape impossible.

The idea to have the demons eyes glow in the film came to Bava on set, who said when filming a scene where the demons approach the camera involved the actors wearing refractive paper which caused the effect.

Filming took place in Berlin and Rome in the summer of 1985.

The film features an instrumental score composed by Claudio Simonetti, as well as a soundtrack that includes songs by Mötley Crüe, Accept and Billy Idol.

Demons received a theatrical release in Italy in October 1985. It was followed by a 1986 sequel, Demons 2, also directed by Bava and produced by Argento. A third Demons film was conceived, but was completely rewritten and released as The Church (1989), directed by Michele Soavi.