DEMONS 3 - Adding to the Mythology of a Cult Film

My first experience with the Demons films was back around 1989. A friend’s father had returned home from a car sale with a pair of VHS he’d picked up for the paltry fee of one British pound.

The first was the incestuous crapfest Nights of Terror - known in the US as Burial Ground. I didn’t care for it at all, although Peter Bark is amazing (look him up already). The second was Demons 2. Needless to say, I had no love for that one either, although there was one scene that DID make an impact. The film’s supposed lead – Sally – is sat alone in an apartment room, separating herself from the party that’s taking place there. She switches on the television and starts to watch a film about Demons (presumably a sequel to the first film). So far, so conventional – and then the Demon in the film turns round and sees Sally watching. The spectator – by extension me – is now the one under threat. It’s genius – an example of horror film at its most primal.

What happens next is more or less a direct precursor for the end of Ring. Even now, the scene holds up well. The FX, all practical, look great and it still packs a stylistic WTF punch to this day.

So, when I was asked about the possibility of writing a Demons comic to be packaged with the special edition DVDs, this was the immediate thing that came to mind. The first time I actually watched the original Demons was only a few months ago, twenty years after I saw the sequel. To my surprise, I loved it. I thought it was wonderful carnage, and ‘Tony The Pimp’ may well be one the greatest stereotype characters of all time. It’s also, unusually for a horror film, set in Berlin which just so happens to be one of my favourite places in the world. In fact, several years ago, I stayed only a few doors down from the Metropol cinema without even knowing it.

Like many other Italian horror films its grasp on logic is tenuous at best, eschewing cause-and-effect, and replacing it with a very haphazard sequence of events which serve the simple purpose of putting the characters through more and more shit. The core concept is profoundly supernatural – Demons appearing in our world as a result of what is either an evil film, or an evil cinema, or perhaps something else. The film is too busy with colourful set pieces to care about an explanation. It ends on an apocalyptic note – Berlin is now overrun with the Demons, all because of that “damn movie!”

The sequel, watching it again some twenty years later, still lacks the visceral punch of the original. Instead of a cinema, we now have an apartment block that becomes infested, and it’s never clear if the film is a sequel to the original or a remake.

So what to do for a comic story?

The first film was designed to be seen in the cinema, and the second, I believe, was actually made with television airings in mind (hence the lack of blood). In short, the medium is the enemy. It stood to reason that Demons emerging from a comic book would be the logical way to continue this, ending with a final ‘leap out at the reader’ image. The problem was I’d just done this exact bit of fourth-wall breaking trickery with a story I’d just submitted elsewhere. Out with that idea. Moving on, perhaps making the comic in 3D would evoke the concept. Too expensive, too gimmicky, too shit.

The concepts of the Demons films, regardless of what you think of their execution, are BIG concepts, so the ideas I had weren’t really cutting it. The idea of the Demons emerging from a comic book didn’t really lead too much in the way of narrative, unless I wanted to rehash the formula of the films beat for beat (I also considered the possibility of the Demons emerging through the internet, say via YouTube). Instead, the better approach seemed to be the simple act of storytelling. No gimmicks, just find a good story that’s essentially already there, and treat the films with respect.

Now, at this point, I’m sure those of you still reading may well be scoffing. Demons is hardly a film revered by the masses, nor does it have a notable following. That’s not the point. So many tie-ins are throwaway, and that’s just wrong. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing for Star Wars, or you’re writing for Manos and his hands of fate. You have to be responsible. Nobody sets out to make a shitty movie, and by the same token, nobody should set out to make a shitty comic book.

The best approach I have found for dealing with an established property is to create a story that will add nuance to the material that already exists. Something that expands the scope of the world – take a key point of the original film that could have gone somewhere, but didn’t, then build upon that while keeping true to the source. Usually I find a character that has the potential to be really interesting, and see the world through their eyes. Be it Sam Loomis in Halloween, or Bub in Day of the Dead.

Demons has the hurdle of having no central figure. There’s no real protagonist of note, just the occasional character who happens to survive. That’s very much a consideration when you’re doing a comic book due to the very restricted space you have, especially for me, as I like people stories.

From here, I started to narrow it down. Would I explain the gap between the first two films to make them connect? Would I write a prequel? Would I write a sequel? Would I write the full story of the films-within-films that spawn the Demons themselves? As I started to do my homework, however, something else of interest came forth – Demons 3.

It turned out there never was an actual Demons 3, but over the years, films had been released under this moniker in an effort to appeal to the audience of the originals. Films such as The Ogre, The Church, and the gloriously titled Black Demons had all been sold under this name.

And that, quite simply, was the answer. Create a ‘real’ Demons 3. Not only that, there was a story in this that could fulfil all of the above possibilities. The ‘damn movie’ within the original Demons also suggested a fantastic lead character – none other than Nostradamus himself. Nostradamus battling Demons? Yes please.

From there, writing it was simple. Sure, there were the inevitable logic problems (try writing a sequel that makes sense to two films that don’t), but it came together fairly well, and I now have a comic I’m really proud of. Will Demons fans like it, whoever they are? I’ll find out when the books fall into their mitts.

I’d like to conclude this pseudo-making-of by praising the comic medium itself. Here we can do real sequels. We can bring back actors and monsters from decades ago without as much as a wrinkle. We can resurrect the dead. We can see them physically, just as they were on screen, but we can now also see directly inside their souls. And no matter how many fans they have – from ten to ten million, we can treat them with love, and give them the adventures we want to see.

P.S. I ultimately couldn’t pass on the ‘Demons-from-comic-book’ idea. That became a three-page standalone story which we created purely to pimp the DVDs and comic. This, you’ll find reproduced here: