Demons (1985) + Demons 2 (1986) – 4K Ultra HD Discs

Dèmoni
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Urbano Barberini, Natasha Hovey, Karl Zinny, Fiore Argento
screenplay by Dario Argento, Lamberto Bava, Dardano Sacchetti, Franco Ferrini
directed by Lamberto Bava

Dèmoni 2… l’incubo ritorna
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring David Knight, Nancy Brilli, Coralina Cataldi Tassoni, Virginia Bryant
written by Dario Argento, Lamberto Bava, Franco Ferrini, Dardano Sacchetti
directed by Lamberto Bava

by Walter Chaw It’s one of the best horror premises ever: A mysterious figure (legendary director Michele Soavi, doing double duty on screen and off as creep and AD, respectively) hands out invitations for a movie premiere to beautiful teens, pimps and their hookers, and other manifold riffraff in the Berlin Underground. The venue is a mysterious theatre, “Metropol,” that no one’s heard of before, and when the curtain goes up, it’s for the pleasure of a dozen or so cinephiles down for a show and maybe some sordid adventure. Then the demons come. Setting a horror movie in a cinema is nothing new, of course (the meta implications of it are too delicious to resist), but I like how the moviegoers in Lamberto Bava’s Demons–these marks, these fools–have been sucked into the freak tent without even having been mesmerized there by an able barker. Turns out, some of us don’t need a showman to pique our curiosity. Turns out, even though we should know better than to show up at a party we’re invited to by some guy in a metal mask on the subway, caution goes right out the window now and again. Maybe I can relate because, for as risk-averse as I am, this is the sort of provocation I could be vulnerable to under the right–which is to say wrong–circumstances. (“Sure thing, friend-o, I’ll watch your movie.” God knows I’ve agreed to worse.) Maybe this is the perfect metaphor for being a film critic in a festival setting: stuck in an auditorium with the creators and no easy way to escape if things go pear-shaped.

Demons centres on gamine music student Cheryl (Natasha Hovey), virginal and wide-eyed but with enough of a wild streak that she’s willing to jump at the opportunity to skip class. It’s likely she only accepts the ticket because she doesn’t want to be rude, and it’s possible she follows through on it in part because it would be rude not to. A lot of nice girls get hurt because they’re taught to be polite to strange men. If there’s a cautionary lesson at the heart of Demons, this might be it. Cheryl gets her buddy Kathy (Paola Cozzo) to play hooky with her, and they arrive at a lobby hastily decorated with, among other things, a poster for co-screenwriter/producer Dario Argento’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet (tacked to the wall next to an advert for No Nukes, a rock-doc that, among other things, introduced the world to Bruce Springsteen’s E-Street Band). A BDSM-dressed mannequin astride a red motorcycle serves as an art installation in the middle of the space, holding a silver demon mask that hooker Rosemary (Geretta Giancarlo, a.k.a. Geretta Geretta) tries on as a joke. Her singularly unpleasant boss, Tony (Bobby Rhodes), tells her to stop acting like an idiot, and Rosemary cuts herself on the cheek in removing the mask. “That’ll teach you to touch things! Sit here and shut up,” he says. It’ll be a pleasure not only watching him die, but also seeing what kind of fight he’ll put up before he does. Hell, maybe he’ll demonstrate some heroism when the time comes, though I doubt it.

Cheryl and Kathy are hit on in the lobby by George (Urbano Barberini) and Ken (Karl Zinny), who swoop in when the ladies are having trouble with the vending machine and slip into the seats next to them as the show’s about to begin. The lights go down, and the first image of the film-within-a-film is a clever one: twin headlights, the lens flare on the screen suggesting a demon’s face with horns above the glowing eyes of the lamps–an echo, as it happens, of the opening shot of Demons itself. Cinematographer Gianlorenzo Battaglia, in his second collaboration with Bava since graduating from an underwater cameraman on stuff like Argento’s Inferno and Altman’s Popeye, does striking, lurid work in Demons. Technicolor saturations are the rule of the day: vibrant reds, deep blues, sulphuric yellows. The gross-outs threaten to overshadow how good this movie looks.

The headlights on the screen belong not to a car but rather two motorcycles (a Buster Keaton gag later used to strong effect in Steve DeJarnatt’s Miracle Mile), the two young couples riding them serving as celluloid mirrors to our paired heroes, Cheryl/George and Kathy/Ken. To bring the image home, Mötley Crüe‘s “Save Our Souls” (which opens with the line “Black Angels laughing in the city streets”) plays beneath a narrator paraphrasing the title of painter Francisco Goya’s “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.” Argento, in his work, often connects the act of watching a film with dreaming–it’s possible this is his invocation of that postmodern muse. In the film-within-the-film, the kids uncover the “grave of Nostradamus.” It holds a dusty book and a demon mask much like the prop in the lobby. Or IS IT A PROP? One of the actors in the film, joking around, puts the mask on and receives a cut on his face for his troubles. Rosemary, alarmed, realizes her own cut is still bleeding and excuses herself. Shit, as they say, is about to get real.

Quick aside: Bava has packed this film with unlikeable people. Apart from the general vapidity of our hero quartet and mean Tony and his girls (Rosemary and Carmen (Fabiola Toledo)), we have a miserable middle-aged married couple, Frank (Stelio Candeli) and Ruth (Nicole Tessier); a blind man, Werner (Alex Serra); and the blind man’s daughter, Liz (Sally Day), whose father warns her not to touch the mask before he touches it himself. Idiots. Every one of them. Rosemary’s wound starts oozing (truthfully, erupting) green goo, and Rosemary transforms into a hideous creature. Carmen goes looking for her and gets a neck full of claws from Rosemary. Carmen stumbles down a long hallway of flowing curtains shot like a Cocteau fantasy, back out into a space behind the movie screen, her cries of distress obscured by screams from the film-within-a-film’s soundtrack. It’s an exceptional sequence subsequently homaged in the opening of Scream 2.

Some members of the audience grow uncomfortable. They’re sure they hear “real” screams, and it’s interesting because all of them are fake, right? There aren’t any “real” screams, only those these performers pretend are real vs. those they’re declaring ersatz. (“C’mon, it’s the Dolby System!” Ken protests.) If the questions this raises are admittedly shallow, they are at least in the ballpark of questions Hitchcock and Antonioni asked once upon a time. Anyway, Carmen tears through the screen into the auditorium. Although Bava isn’t quite a showman on the level of Argento (or his own father, Mario), there is a moment in medium-shot (which should’ve been an extreme closeup) of Carmen’s face protruding from a vaginal opening in the screen that recalls Tilde’s death in Argento’s Tenebrae. She is birthed from the film into the proscenium, and it’s here that Carmen completes her transformation. Sergio Stivaletti’s practical and makeup effects, it should be said, are exceptional.

Now, the first of several disappointments. The humans immediately band together against the infernal threat. Tony turns out to be not so bad. Frank is every bit as awful as you suspect, but his throat’s torn out almost immediately. And the blind guy–who is, after all, just a blind guy–dies having his eyes poked out. I note how Frank and Werner are dispatched because there appears to be a little poetry in it. Frank, a loudmouth with nothing to say, is fatally muzzled, while blind Werner gets, er, eye-murdered. Perhaps all that’s really going on is a bunch of f/x guys doing what looks coolest. Worse, the punk gang that disrupts the proceedings in George A. Romero’s Argento-produced Dawn of the Dead resurfaces here to do coke and listen to Billy Idol before bursting into the theatre, cops hot on their trail, adding even more chaos to the demon invasion.

One could argue that the arrival of the gang in Dawn of the Dead is (further) confirmation the humans are the real enemy in Romero’s zombie flicks–that the anti-humanist scourge (as author/scholar Daniel Kraus pointedly characterized Romero’s zombie virus) is likely an attempt to restore balance to a world fatally bumfucked by mankind. I have no problem with this message, played out and exhausted though it may be, but I wonder if the near-total absence of anyone to root for in these films already makes the point more powerfully. It begs the question, why the subterfuge on the part of the demons? Are they like souvenir-shop proprietors, driven mad by the constant flow of tourists, guarding against the “touching” of their merchandise like the Yeoman Guard Extraordinary glowering over the Crown Jewels?

Another problem is that once the shenanigans commence in earnest, it seems like the victims in the audience multiply. Without understanding what the stakes are, down to even the number of good guys/potential zombies vs. the already-turned, well…it makes it all matter less. There will simply be mayhem until the mayhem is over. It’s like an 80-minute marble race with extra marbles added at random: in the end, all you’re rooting for is for it to be over. There was apparently discord behind the scenes, with concept originator Dardano Sacchetti getting pushed aside by producer Argento, who brought in his own writer, Franco Ferrini, before inviting Sacchetti back to give the script a final polish. There’s some tissue rejection in the meld. Argento is best–maybe genius-level best–when he’s adapting Hitchcock or borrowing from his closest competitor/clone, Brian De Palma. His returns decidedly diminish once he begins to cannibalize himself.

In Demons, Argento is obviously cribbing the structure from Dawn of the Dead (the gang invasion, the appearance of a helicopter) while stealing the “birth” image and a villain reveal jump-scare from Tenebrae. Unfortunately, Bava isn’t in tune with these stylistic flourishes and so either “misses” them or undercuts them with a broad misanthropy bearing little resemblance to Romero’s blue humanism or even Argento’s appreciation of fairytale archetypes. Consider weird Ingrid (Nicoletta Elmi), a statuesque redhead taking tickets who, in her obliqueness, would be one of the Mothers in an Argento flick. In other words, she would be an emissary from the Otherworld–a foreshadowing of things to come. In Demons, she’s a person lacking in social skills. By using familiar elements from another director’s arsenal without knowing how or caring to honour them properly, you’re engaging in parody.

The last hour or so of Demons is goopy carnage, the highlight of which is the proper use of a samurai sword whilst astride a motorcycle, John Wick-style. The entire sequence of George “Knightriders” Romero’s namesake riding and slashing through the darkened moviehouse has a real The Last Dragon sense of camp fun about it. It isn’t shot particularly well, the stunts aren’t great, and it’s nonsense geographically, but it cooks, and you wish the whole movie were like this: Lamberto Bava’s Streets of Fire with Accept‘s “Fast as a Shark” blasting instead of Jim Steinman. The closing reveal, suggesting the apocalypse in a supernatural proliferation of monsters, brings to mind the Harlan Ellison short story “Flop Sweat,” meaning it’s a fine, if obvious, cliffhanger setting up another installment. Demons‘ ending is also vaguely reminiscent of Bruno Mattei’s Rats: Night of Terror in that there’s an inexplicability to it that is nonetheless nightmarishly effective.

Already fascinating as an expansion of the first film’s metatext, the sequel, put into production immediately and released the following year, layers in a sharp critique of the American “Me” generation, yielding something smarter and more thematically cohesive than the original. Think Prom Night to Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night 2, or The Evil Dead to Evil Dead 2. Demons 2 opens with a narrator recapping the events of Demons and reassuring us that the demon siege only lasted a few days before, we presume, humanity figured out how to put a lid on it. As we have learned from pandemic management in capitalist societies, this seems highly unlikely, but nevertheless. A documentary (?) airing on television sees another quartet of young people on a quest through the city’s wastelands in search of demon artifacts to maybe sell on the black market. (I’m filling in a lot of blanks here.) They find a claw and the dialogue mainly concerns how valuable it is; I’m presuming these industrious scamps are there for their taste of fame and a graverobbing fortune. Meanwhile, in the “real” world, the residents of a modern apartment complex called “The Tower” are preparing for a night in. Young couple George (David Edwin Knight)–no relation to the previous George–and his pregnant wife Hannah (Nancy Brilli) are in their dayglo Nagel pad, just down the hall from little kid Tommy (Marco Vivio), who’s left unsupervised for the evening. Meanwhile, twentysomething Sally (Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni) is gearing up for a birthday party by dancing to The Smith‘s “Panic” and Peter Murphy’s “Blue Heart” and throwing a childish fit over nothing and locking herself in her bedroom to watch TV. I don’t think the younglings realize how the television was our suckling nipple the way their phones are now.

In the documentary on TV, an ossified demon corpse is resurrected via a few misplaced drops of blood, and the demon, as demons are wont to do, pulls a Videodrome, bulging forth from the television set in a practical effect that always works for me. This causes Shivers-like pandemonium to break out throughout the complex and a band of ’80s fitness freaks–exiles from the Olivia Newton-John “Physical” video, essentially, led by Tony the pimp, er, Hank (Bobby Rhodes again)–to take up arms in defense of the building. The marriage of ’80s trendiness and gorefest is delicious. Nods to everything from Aliens to Ghoulies are sprinkled throughout. The child, Tommy, named after one of the kids Laurie is babysitting in Halloween, takes refuge, like Laurie does in that film, in a closet with slatted doors, though here that spells doom. I appreciated the way Hank is finally killed (neutered in a way that is both respectful of his power and horribly racist), and if I have a complaint, it’s that George and Hannah’s unborn child isn’t treated with the same callousness as Tommy and Hank. If you’re gonna do it, do it. Yet the stroke of genius in Demons 2 is how it sees the television signal as a virus ten full years before Hideo Nakata’s The Ring. How, in the midst of its indiscriminate borrowing and mad remixing, it extrapolates what would happen, eventually, were the Videodrome signal to become a basic-cable staple.

Demons 2 is, and I offer this not as a criticism but praise, the “For Dummies” version of Shivers and perhaps Cronenberg’s overall body of work. It broaches the topic of pregnancy, how it and aging are the twin fonts of body horror; and it nails the yuppie movement as childish, facile, solipsistic, and materially obsessed. The Phoebe Cates-looking Sally, poised to be the Final Girl of a lesser film, is irredeemable. She is shrill and image-obsessed, the needy centre of attention, the class bully. When a situation arises that is actually merit-based and not class-bequeathed, she’s the first one fed to the Darwin blender and the final monster to be dispatched. Of course Sally-monster’s evil superpower is broadcast television–and of course the only way to defeat her is by obliterating every camera drawn to her. The bad guy in Demons 2 is Reaganomics–neoconservatism and its broadcast-aided proliferation. There’s a reason Fox News’ female anchors are bleached blonde and have their teeth capped. Somewhere, Romero is grinning ear-to-ear.

THE 4K UHD DISCS
Synapse shepherds both Demons films to 4K UHD disc in 1.66:1, 2160p transfers with Dolby Vision and HDR10 encoding sourced from the original camera negatives. To call this presentation of Demons gorgeous is maybe an understatement. The colours are “jukebox in a sleazy honkytonk” lush, emphasizing, for example, the expressionistic pop of the purple clouds hovering ominously above the Metropol, the cherry-red motorcycle in the theatre’s lobby, and the bathroom’s peculiar golden lighting during the first transformation. For all that, the palette can be remarkably subtle, restoring an aquamarine flavour to the institutional subway tiles of the Berlin Underground without drawing excess attention to them. As the gore begins in earnest, the delightful artificiality of it, secretly loved by practical-effects fiends everywhere, receives its proper, printed-on-pulp EC flavour. Fine detail astonishes (you feel like if you touched the screen while it’s showing bubbling pustules and exploding cavities, your fingers would come away damp), while the dynamic range delivers cavernous blacks and gleaming highlights. Hell yes.

Multiple audio mixes grace the disc, presenting the film in Italian (with 5.1 and 2.0 DTS-HD MA tracks), International English (ditto), and U.S. English (2.0 DTS-HD MA only). The U.S. English version actually runs seven seconds longer thanks to additional close-ups of a Coca-Cola can the punks use for their cocaine. This tickles me because Demons 2 is a very fine skewering of capitalism, and this is the kind of minutiae that causes me to chuckle knowingly and elbow my irritated date, who’s just about had enough of me, thanks. With the exception of the extended cut’s monaural audio, the remaining tracks are based on the four-channel recording heard in theatres equipped with Dolby Stereo. My preference is the International English version’s 2.0 option. It’s gratifyingly loud and somehow more “Spaghetti western” in that everything sounds slightly uncanny and displaced.

Kat Ellinger and Heather Drain, hosts of the Hell’s Belles podcast, record the first of two feature-length yakkers. It’s a fun listen, if lacking in much exploration of the piece beyond what seems a fervent and genuine affection for it. I was uncomfortable with the observation that a blind man going to the movies was meant as a humorous element, especially as Ellinger subsequently observes that the film never feels mean-spirited. Is jabbing the eyes out of a blind man not at least mean-spirited? More, the blind man to me is a shout-out to Argento’s Suspiria. There, the man is betrayed by his helper dog while in Demons his daughter is too busy making out with some creeper when her dad needs her the most. Anyway, blind people go to the movies all the time. Ellinger and Drain commenting on how “cool” it is for Argento’s half-daughter Fiore to appear in the film at 15 also raises the spectre, for me, of Argento casting 10-year-old Asia in Demons 2 and then asking her to go topless at 16 for Trauma. There are landmines and tripwires in Demons and this period of Italian slashers is what I’m saying, but this isn’t that kind of commentary.

Director Lamberto Bava, makeup designer Sergio Stivaletti, composer Claudio Simonetti, and actress Geretta Geretta (Rosemary) reunite for a separate yak-track that discusses shooting lore, including locations troubled by competing governmental interests. Bava the younger brusquely demurs when asked if he was paying tribute to his dad’s Black Sunday with the demon mask and immediately changes the subject. I may be reading too much into it, but if I went into the same business as my father and he happened to be one of a handful of absolute fucking geniuses ever to do what he did, I’d be deflecting, too. I love all the talk about “water dripping” and making things moist and disgusting and how this stunning transfer brings into relief the individual beads of light collecting on the surface of the tendrils snaking along the walls. The foursome trainspot sound-design choices and explain why the camera was put in certain places at certain times, and it’s heartwarming when Geretta laments being unavailable for the sequel and Bava says he had a centrepiece role for her. A final comparison of the film’s second half to a western with cowboys under siege by the “Indians” is a valuable bit of insight as well. Indispensable stuff, this.

Several short docs continue the special features. “Produced by Dario Argento” (27 mins., HD) is an Arrow-commissioned video essay by Michael Mackenzie that gives a broad overview of Argento’s career leading up to his work as a producer, starting with the TV anthology series “Door Into Darkness” (1973), a riff on “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” that established Argento’s persona as a troubled artist whose work is a direct reflection of his thoughts and fantasies. It was a persona he cultivated, and it made him a household name in his native Italy. He went on to produce Dawn of the Dead and collaborate with Romero again on Two Evil Eyes, and while he didn’t interfere with the former, he did do a cut of the film that jettisons most of the humour and leans hard on a Goblin score. Mackenzie covers the making of Demons and offers a fair and perceptive analysis of Argento’s artistic strengths and weaknesses. If you have any interest in a quick, learned, intuitive lesson in Argento as a man and a creator, this is it. I would read anything Mackenzie published about Argento but moreover Michele Soavi, whose career he tantalizingly examines as part of this essay. I learned an awful lot.

Collected under “Archival Special Features” are a selection of HiDef featurettes initially produced for the now out-of-print Arrow release:

• “Dario’s Demon Days” (11 mins.) is an old interview with Argento focused on Demons in which Argento recalls Bava asking him to help get the project off the ground. He professes a love of German Expressionism, says the prosthetics in the film were easy to do, and refers to his rival Lucio Fulci as a good friend. Argento is patronizing about how he allowed Soavi to helm Fulci’s final project after Fulci’s passing, which doesn’t sit right as a tale. (You know how some stories say the opposite of what they’re meant to say?) He claims it’s not his fault his name was plastered all over the credits and advertising for Demons, blaming it on the distributors. Okay, but what about stuff like Phenomena, where he credits himself with every creative role and puts his name above the title? Honestly, if I had made even one of the films he directed up through Tenebrae, I’d be insufferable, too. As a rimshot, Argento shits on Demons 2 for not being as interesting as the first film. Whatever you’re preference, Demons 2 is nothing if not interesting.
• Defining an Era in Music (10 mins.) finds Simonetti describing his process of composing for film. He has only kind words for Bava and says Dario never gave him any trouble. Simonetti says he’s proud of Demons because it was the first time he saw his name in the credits as a composer.
• In “Splatter Spaghetti Style” (12 mins.), filmmaker Luigi Cozzi is tasked with choosing the ten best gialli. He offers plenty of background info on and rationalization for his choices, such as Mario Soldati’s Malombra, Riccardo Freda’s The Ghost (starring Barbara Steele), and Mario Bava’s Kill Baby Kill. Suffice it to say it’s an excellent list that alternates the obvious and the obscure, as all top-tens should. I added a few to my watchlist based on Cozzi’s recommendations.
• “Carnage at the Cinema” (36 mins.) interviews Bava, who recounts Demons‘ origins as a proposed mini-series called King of Evil and tells his side of the story regarding Argento’s involvement, giving Dario full credit for accentuating the script’s virtues and effectively bringing a dead project back to life. He speaks at length about the writing process and reveals a connection to Dostoyevsky regarding the film’s title. I was rapt at Bava’s recollection of shooting in a divided Berlin, which meant changing perspectives and angles whenever they got too close to the Wall. He even touches on the “Demon Tommy” sequence from Demons 2, offering real insight into what makes special effects work when they work.
• With “Dario and the Demons” (16 mins.), Argento goes long on his passion for art and producing for other directors so they can receive a spotlight on the world stage. He bemoans the modern state of film production and the fate of many directors landing on television, where their work has a tendency to be buried. He rips on Demons 2 again but admits that it’s pretty scary and allows that the move from theatre to apartment complex was a good, “claustrophobic” one. I have to agree.
• Cozzi returns in “Monstrous Memories” (HD, 30 mins.) to spill some beans. Argento, he says, was over-budget on Phenomena, his first film as both director and producer, and in a panic he looked to his financiers and distributors for relief. Told he was out of luck, and with Phenomena already in post, Argento started casting about for another project to produce so he could use any extra money from that film to finance the completion of his own. Consider this in the context of Bava’s warm recollections of Dario seeking him out for a project to finance and a picture begins to emerge of the kind of stuff Dario was up to while espousing the sanctity of art and the purity of his vision. Cozzi describes the Dardano script for Demons as “excellent,” contrary to Argento’s recollection, and so, again, we’re on the horns of a dilemma concerning how best to interpret history. The chaotic disconnect I sense in Demons is starting to make more sense. Cozzi speaks only warmly of Lamberto, who grew up “in the shadow of Mario.”
• The great Alan Jones provides historical and strong critical perspectives on Demons in “Profondo Jones: The Critical Perspective” (18 mins.). The UK-based Jones has long been an authority on genre matters, and his presence here is more than welcome. He points out that Mario Bava’s uncredited work on Inferno may have pushed Argento to want to help Lamberto before revealing that Fiore Argento retired after Demons largely because of how Lamberto (mis)treated her on set. The more you know, the less you know. Jones remembers the Rome premiere of Demons and the mania of the crowd assembled for a “Dario Argento Production.” It’s the sort of first-hand account that helps immeasurably in understanding more about not just the movie itself but also the environment that produced it. I could listen to Jones for days.
• “Splatter Stunt Rock” (9 mins.) interviews Ottaviano Dell’Acqua, a stuntman on Demons who is clearly (to me, anyway) one of the models for Brad Pitt’s character in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. He reflects on the superiority of the Italian stunt team (as compared to the German one) and the high standards of Bava and Argento, who demanded perfection from difficult stunts. Superficial at best, it’s skippable. Lastly, “Sergio Stivaletti Q&A” (36 mins.) is a 2019 Q&A with the F/X maestro shot at an English film festival. I tend not to like these live sessions with an audience present, as it dumbs down the conversation. Again, skippable. Fortunately, Stivaletti does himself one better in the commentary track.

A trio of Demons trailers rounds the bonuses. The keepcase houses a replica movie-ticket for the Metropol in addition to the Synapse catalogue.

The 4K UHD presentation of Demons 2 is of a piece, technically, with its predecessor. Curiously, for all the aesthetic continuity between the two films, the first resembles a 1970s relic to me, whereas the sequel is every inch a product of the blockbuster era. The image on this disc is sufficiently filmic, sometimes outright grainy, but comparatively speaking it is to Demons what Gremlins 2 is to Gremlins: industrialized “cleanness” vs. rustic naturalism. (One might go so far as to call this visual pivot “meta,” as it is in Gremlins 2.) With the wider colour gamut, the intensity of the primary colours practically functions as a satire of the plastic-fantastic that typified the decade. HDR enriches the glitzy highlights and deep shadows, and the clarity is such that the lo-def broadcast signal is recreated to nostalgic perfection. I love how rosy the skin tones are–it makes it extra tragic when the grotesque overtakes the Tower residents. Note that at two moments–once briefly at 28:06, then again from 59:13-59:43–the picture vertically stutters as if the pin registration has become unsteady. I suspect this is damage baked into the source as a result of faulty camera equipment. Otherwise, Demons 2 thrives in this format.

Of the 5.1 and 2.0 Italian and English listening options, I once again prefer the four-channel English theatrical mix in unbastardized 2.0 DTS-HD MA. Though light in its surround usage, it’s sufficiently immersive and robust. The soundtrack of ’80s faves–which could easily constitute one of the mixtapes I made in high school for girls I wanted to love me–responds well to amplification. The 5.1 alternatives are fine.

Gracing the Demons 2 platter is an exquisite audio commentary from Travis Crawford, who mixes cogent observations with exhaustive background info on the production, teasing out major themes and tropes from the first and second films in a way that I greatly appreciated. I wait until the end of the writing process to audit these special features so as not to be unduly influenced, but I feel like Mr. Crawford and I are more simpatico than not. His knowledge of Italian horror is far more encyclopedic than mine, of course, and he wields it with grace and interest. He tosses off so many titles with confidence and scholarship that it’s worth keeping a notebook handy while you listen. Next, the great Alexandra Heller-Nicholas contributes Together and Apart: Space and Technology (27 mins., HD), a video essay that goes deep on the mise en scène of the Demons saga. An exemplary model for how and why video essays should be used for critical understanding, it’s like a small film school. Her deconstruction of the use of architecture, set dressing, and even font choices in these films addresses one of my many blindspots. I was riveted. Heller-Nicholas is smart as fuck, and I’ll be using this in my classrooms.

Another stash of Arrow extras appends this edition of Demons 2:

• Stivaletti returns in “Creating Creature Carnage” (21 mins., SD), this time in a far more effective one-on-one context as he reminisces about learning his trade on films like Demons and An American Werewolf in London that featured groundbreaking transformation effects. He calls Rick Baker his teacher, although he’s never met him. Stivaletti strikes me as a humble guy. He expresses an aversion to doing zombies, and I have to say, the demons don’t look like zombies in the traditional sense despite the creation lore being much the same. He adds that time, money, and a large cast of extras dictated fairly simple makeup applications. A strong piece, with Stivaletti conscientiously giving credit where it’s due.
• “Bava to Bava” (17 mins., SD) marks the return of Cozzi, whose predictably invaluable history of the horror genre in his homeland traces its arc from Riccardo Freda to Mario Bava to what he calls “the younger generations.” He waxes poetic about an industry that used to produce 400 films a year but whose output of late has dwindled to an annual trickle of 40 or less. He emphasizes Argento’s role in pulling genre into the mainstream with major stars and big budgets, citing Deep Red as the maestro’s masterpiece. A younger me would have disagreed, but I found myself nodding in agreement. Cozzi is a treasure, even if he thinks Soavi’s The Church could be the last great Italian horror film when really it’s Soavi’s The Sect.
• Listed as “Demonic Influence” on the menu, “Demonic Influences” (11 mins., HD) interviews director Federico Zampaglione about his memories of Demons, and his recollections of the fever surrounding the picture’s Italian premiere line up with Jones’s. Alas, this is the first feature on either disc that feels like filler.
• “The Demons Generation” (35 mins., HD) introduces a third Bava, Lamberto’s son Fabrizio “Roy” Bava, who worked on both Demons and shares fond memories of volunteering to work on the first film as a 17-year-old metalhead. He seems like a lovely guy, Roy does, but this is the second segment in a row that feels insubstantial and unnecessary. I did learn that the films’ five-week shooting schedule was longer than Mario used to get, which jibes with my understanding of the limitations placed on the old guard. Roy remembers his grandfather telling him never to get married or have children. Thirty-five minutes is a very long time for this kind of stuff.
• In “The New Blood of Italian Horror” (16 mins., HD), Stivaletti shines the spotlight on Soavi, drawing ideological comparisons between him and his forebears. “I saw a lot of Mario Bava in Soavi… He was more interested in atmosphere than action.” He goes on to say he could talk to Soavi “like a friend,” as they learned their craft together on Phenomena and continued to build their relationship on Soavi’s The Church, The Sect, and Cemetery Man. I love The Sect so much that all of Soavi’s work has risen in my estimation. Can I confess that, at this point, I would revisit this trilogy prior to his career interruption sooner than any Argento? Anyway, this is a wonderful piece.
• “Screaming for a Sequel: The Delirious Legacy” (16 mins., HD) continues the dialogue with Lamberto, steering the subject to his father’s influence on and mentorship of him via a series of films. He makes a case for Demons 2 as having more great moments than its predecessor and defends its satirical approach, saying a sturdier partnership with his writers and Argento led to a comparatively lighthearted set and, by extension, a more palatable film. Soavi, whose first brush with Bava was when Bava declined to cast him in his directorial debut, Macabre, comes in for praise, and Bava spills the tea regarding why a third Demons film never happened in spite of a deal having been struck with foreign investors. It’s an educational story involving copyrights, distributor jitters, and the desire of artists not to be shackled to a franchise. He expresses some hurt at not being credited more prominently on The Church, a project he worked on for a long time, but he can smile about it now.
• Composer Simon Boswell headlines “A Soundtrack for Splatter” (27 mins., HD), in which he repeats that he didn’t study to be a film composer enough times that it starts to sound defensive. He recaps how his failed efforts to help Goblin patch together a score for Phenomena resulted in him getting shuffled over to Demons 2. Hinting at his friction with said band, he describes his work as gothic as opposed to prog-rock. That being said, he does marry voices with synths, so…I don’t know. Boswell seems embarrassed to be associated with Argento’s trademark sound, and I wish he’d get over it. In his defense, he handpicked the needle-drops from Fields of the Nephilim, Love & Rockets, and Dead Can Dance that grace the Demons 2 soundtrack; making a deal with Beggars Banquet is this ’80s goth kid’s dream marriage. Boswell goes on to explain how he managed to license a song from The Smiths, a band not on the Beggars Banquet label. It’s a good anecdote I won’t spoil for you.

Remastered Italian and English trailers for Demons 2 round out the video-based supplements. An invitation to Sally’s birthday party joins the Synapse catalogue in filling out the keepcase.

• Demons
  88 minutes; R; 1.66:1 (2160p/MPEG-H, Dolby Vision/HDR10); Italian 5.1 DTS-HD MA, Italian 2.0 DTS-HD MA (Stereo), English 5.1 DTS-HD MA, English 2.0 DTS-HD MA (Stereo), English 2.0 DTS-HD MA (Mono) (U.S. version); English SDH subtitles; BD-100; Region-free; Synapse
• Demons 2
  91 minutes; R; 1.66:1 (2160p/MPEG-H, Dolby Vision/HDR10); Italian 5.1 DTS-HD MA, Italian 2.0 DTS-HD MA (Stereo), English 5.1 DTS-HD MA, English 2.0 DTS-HD MA (Stereo); English SDH subtitles; BD-100; Region-free; Synapse