This week, two ‘80s horror classics are available on Blu-ray from Shout! Factory’s horror arm, Scream Factory. Night of the Demons is the infamous Halloween horror film with Linnea Quigley and her lipstick. If you actually haven’t seen it yet, spoiler warning because I ask director Kevin S. Tenney about it. Witchboard starred Tawny Kitaen as a woman who gets a little too close to the spirits on the other side of a Ouija board. Tenney directed both films and spoke with me by phone after I returned from Sundance to go back in time to the ‘80s.
CraveOnline: Did you always want to have animated titles on Night of the Demons?
Kevin S. Tenney: No, the writer/producer Joe Augustyn did and when we first talked about it and I realized how expensive they were, I was kind of against it because I thought with that money I could have another day of shooting. But our line producer, Don Robinson, had come from an animation background and he knew some people. He took us in to meet Kevin Kutchaver and Kevin did a black and white test for us. The minute I saw the test, I was like, “Okay, yeah, I’m on board. Let’s do it.”
Has that become one of the memorable aspects of the film?
Oh yeah, everyone talks about it. I think the animation joined with my brother’s driving rock music lets everyone know exactly what kind of film they’re about to see. I think you sit down, you see those titles and you know, “Okay, we’re just here to party.”
Razors in apples were really a thing back then, weren’t they?
I never knew anyone who actually did it but that was always the fear. Don’t eat anything that isn’t packaged. Get a Snickers bar but if it’s homemade, don’t eat it because you never know what they might have put in it.
Did they really think you would swallow the razor without knowing it?
Well, no, obviously you can’t possibly. That’s what I mean when I say it’s a silly movie because the guy has two full blown razor blades come out his throat. How did he chew and swallow two complete razor blades and not know it until they were going down his gullet?
Linnea Quigley’s character is so much about her makeup, and the makeup now looks extra crusty on the Blu-ray. Were you pleased with that?
It’s HD so you shoot what you think you’re going to see in 35[mm]. A lot of actresses complain about HD now because warts and all, there it is. There’s no filter so to speak to keep them looking glamorous.
But it’s good for the demon makeup.
Oh yeah. I still think Steve [Johnson]’s makeup is better than a lot of the horror films that are coming out today. I think his stuff holds up 25 years later.
Did the strobe light hide a cut when Stooge appears from behind?
Oh, absolutely. That was the whole reason I wanted the strobes was so I could do that, have him just pop in.
I saw Night of the Demons on VHS. Did it open in theaters?
Yeah, it played in all the markets but unlike Witchboard which opened nationally in 1100 theaters, Night of the Demons did like 300 theaters on the east coast and 300 in the midwest. They just had the 300 prints and they went across the country with them.
At what point did you realize it was garnering a cult following?
I don’t think I guess until the internet and I could look it up and see all these sites that were devoted to it and all these threads where people were talking about it, and IMDB where all the fans were raving about it. I don’t think I really had a clue and I had no idea in all these foreign countries it was a big deal too until eBay came up and you could actually go to eBay Germany and see people selling VHS copies of the German version or the Spanish version or the Italian version. That was quite eye opening for me. I remember the first time I even discovered that Witchboard was out on Laserdisc was when a fan brought the cover in to me at a Fangoria convention and asked me to sign it. That’s how I learned that it was out on Laserdisc. I didn’t even know.
It wasn’t big in the late ‘80s?
Yeah, but most of the promoters at that time or the distributors, they didn’t make a point if they released it on a new medium. They didn’t contact the director and let him know because they figured my job was done, fuck me. No, no, it was a very big hit in the ‘80s. Like I said it played in 1100 theaters and it was the fifth highest grossing film when it opened nationally. It was the fifth for the week, and then when it premiered on HBO it was their top program for the week it opened, beating out other big movies and their own original programming. So it did really well. I just didn’t realize that 25 years later, people would still care about it.
What do you think it is about that classic “kids in a house with bad stuff happening” movie that made Night of the Demons last?
I think in both cases, Withboard and Night of the Demons, in Witchboard I think I created characters you cared about, and also it was a Ouija board, and when I was researching Ouijas, they’ve been around forever in some form or another. Every culture has something resembling a Ouija board that they believe can talk to spirits. I thought that’s a pretty good cross-section of the world, so there might be an audience for this.
Then with Night of the Demons I think the house was just so big and creepy that even when nothing was going on, there was always the possibility that something was going to happen around each corner, so you were always on edge.
