by Spencer Hawken

Created on: February 10, 2008

During the 1960's and 1970's Italy had ruled the cinema in respect of horror movies, Italian directors took viewers to levels they never expected to go and inspiring others to follow in their wake, Alfred Hitchcock, Quentin Tarentino, Eli Roth, and David Cronenberg all loved Italian horror and thriller cinema so much that they literally borrowed from other movies to make theirs better. Come the 1980's and while still enjoying popularity America fought back for the horror mantle, and it appeared that Italian directors had been left behind.

Then in 1985 Lamberto Bava fought back, regaining the Italy's place in horror with something uniquely different. Demons was a bizarre mix of horror and music, as much a music video as a horror tale. Music laid at the very heart of music with not only the usual Italian rock band Goblin (that seemed to work on most Italian movies) but Western influences also taking part, Saxon, Go West, Billy Idol and Motley Crue all wrote specific scores for the movie (some even became hits that rocked the charts).

In West Berlin a group of everyday people are invited to a cinema for a free movie screening (by means of street handouts) at a brand new venue. Unaware of what they are going to see many of the audience are a little distressed to discover they are watching a horror movie. With peoples stress levels running high (from the terror of the movie onscreen) some of the viewers start to discover an unwelcome similarity to events onscreen and events that occurred in the lobby prior to entering the auditorium; a specific injury causing the biggest cause of alarm. As the terror onscreen begins to get worse, for one young women watching things are getting more terrifying by the minute as her injury gets worse. And it's at that exact time when things onscreen get completely out of hand, that events in the cinema really kick off too. As the onscreen actors find themselves trapped, the audience find themselves trapped too, in a cinema that seemingly has been bricked up after they entered. But this not just a tale of being trapped, for the audience is not alone hideous creatures start to pick off the viewers one by one.

There are few movies so heavily paced as Demons, it seems that no sooner has the movie started than you're into the heart of the action. When the film seems like it's been on for 10 minutes you discover it's been going for nearly 30 minutes. This is an absolutely out of the ordinary horror movie that features zombies, samurai action,

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