One Dark Night (1982)

SEPTEMBER 2, 2020

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: STREAMING (SHUDDER)

I couldn't have picked a better movie to celebrate the return of HMAD proper than One Dark Night, because not only was it good (more on that soon, obviously), but it was a blind spot that lasted for the entirety of the site's run. As a huge fan of Jason Lives, I obviously wanted to see the movie that got Tom McLoughlin the gig, but it was never available at any of my video stores growing up, and was also going out of print a lot thanks to the bungling of ownership that accompanies far too many indie horror films of yore. But when I started HMAD back in 2007 and replaced my Blockbuster DVD queue (!) with just about every horror title I could find, One Dark Night was currently "long wait", so I put it at the very top... and it remained there until the company went out of business. Somewhere in the world, some horror fan has a copy in that little blue mailing sleeve, and he has no idea how much I loathe him.

At least it was worth the wait! It's an entry in an unheralded but mostly enjoyable sub-sub-genre of horror: the "have to spend all night in a _____" movie. Like Hell Night (shot around the same time), our heroine has to prove her bravery by staying all night in a spooky place, and the people who put her up to it plan to make it harder by scaring her with masks and pranks, only for all of them to discover that there's a genuine threat. In this case, it's the corpse of a recently deceased psychic vampire (not Colin Robinson), who isn't fully dead and still has enough juice to make crypts explode and corpses walk around, using them to terrorize the three girls and, presumably, suck in enough of their energy to fully revive himself.

Interestingly, lead Meg Tilly and the other girls don't know anything about that guy. All of the exposition about him occurs in a series of otherwise unrelated scenes where the daughter of the vampire is told about her father's powers by an old friend of his, and she starts to suspect maybe she has some of his abilities as well, despite total skepticism from her husband (Adam West! In a totally straight, non-campy performance! It's like when you see Leslie Nielsen in a pre-Airplane movie). Once the woman understands the full breadth of her father's powers, and what he was up to, she realizes that he isn't fully stopped yet and heads to the mausoleum to finish him off. Normally, she'd show up earlier and explain this to the girls/the audience, but that's not how it happens here. From the girls' POV, they go into a mausoleum, creepy shit happens for no reason whatsoever, and then some lady shows up out of nowhere to save them.

It's an unusual way to dish out the exposition, but it works. Since Tilly or the others never stop to read an old book or stand a few feet away from where they were just attacked to listen to someone yammer about what's going on, the tension for their scenes rarely lets up once it starts. Also, McLoughlin sidesteps a common problem in horror movies, which is that the characters have no reason to be afraid but WE know there's a legit danger. By the time the two other girls show up to start pranking her, we're already clued into that something is afoot, so we get to worry about them a bit. The leader of the group is a typical mean girl, so whatever for her, but the other is just tentatively going along with the ride in order to remain on the mean one's good side, so we can root for her and also not consider their actions to be stupid, as they're both sure that the only "haunting" stuff is coming from them. And it's all because the low budget probably meant McLoughlin had to film all the exposition stuff - largely delivered via cassette tape played by the woman, alone in a nondescript room - in one day.

The budget clearly wasn't skimpy for the FX heavy finale though, where the corpses shamble around, faces falling off, as crypts explode all around them. It's a PG movie thanks to the lack of direct violence, but man, the girls being smothered by the corpses is some terrifying stuff, and probably totally f-ed up any kid who may have seen it on cable during the daytime due to its unrestricted rating. It kind of reminded me of the scene in Tourist Trap where the one girl was covered with (also telekinetic-controlled!) mannequins; as if McLoughlin saw that scene and wanted to top it with real bodies (if so: success!). There's also a pretty great/gross payoff; one of the mean girls' pranks on Tilly is to throw some joke store goop on her, only for them to get legit corpse goop all over their own faces later - heh. The main villain himself doesn't do much, just stays pretty much still while his eyes emit little electricity sparks, but the sudden onslaught of what seems like half of the mausoleum's populace more than makes up for it.

That said, you do have to be a bit patient to get to it. It's 30 minutes in before Tilly even arrives at the mausoleum, and another 20 before the girls return i.e. when things ramp up. The time isn't wasted; it's spent on developing everyone (even the mean girl, whose boyfriend left her for Tilly, explaining her reasons for disliking her) and filling in the backstory so that the final 25 minutes or so can be almost nonstop, but modern audiences might be thrown off by the "wait" (hopefully the PG rating will tell them right off the bat that this isn't a body count kind of film). Things start kind of awkwardly too; some ambulances pull up to what seems like a massacre site, with the bodies of the villain and his last batch of victims, but we learn about all of this through a radio conversation over footage of no one speaking - it's very odd. It recovers from that sort of thing quickly enough, I should stress, but as I said, it's not a roller coaster paced movie.

I'm glad it's on Shudder now (along with The Evil, which it reminded me of at times in that "late night horror movie" kind of way), as it's kind of a perfect movie for the season, a mix of harmless spooky pranks and genuine terror, but without the violence and disturbing nature of a lot of horror films that, while I obviously love, don't seem particularly suited to the holiday. I associate Halloween with fun and "light" terror as opposed to things like The Shining (not this year obviously, but usually Kubrick's film plays every October at the Arclight, and I do not understand how they zeroed in on THAT as a Halloween tradition), and One Dark Night - even that title! - checks all those seasonal boxes. And it looks good too; I understand at least one of those previous releases looked like crap due to using poor elements, but I thought it looked quite good on Shudder's stream. Enjoy!

What say you?

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