Night of the Devils

Fear and terror … unfortunately they didn’t show up. At the beginning I thought it could work out, because locations in the Southern European countryside for some mysterious reason work on me and can help otherwise average films. Not this time, though. To begin with, it’s incredibly slow and I fell asleep around the middle when I tried watching it the first time. The following day I managed the second half without sleeping, but to my dismay it was even worse than the first one. The ending was not good, either. The fight with the zombies was funny. (04/03/2013)

Based on a high-quality novel, Night of the Devils is neither a B-movie nor Euro-trash. Giorgio Ferroni delivers a captivating drama about the members of a cursed family living on a farm in a Yugoslavian forest. Or rather, a drama about a lost passer-by who asks them to help him repair his car. Everything – from the casting and portrayal of the characters, to the revelation of the consequences of the curse, which, together with the main character, we are initially sceptical about – works so well that the purely horror gore scenes are actually surprising with their straight-forwardness. But pleasantly so – similarly high-quality character-based drama is rare, if not exceptional, in old Italian horror movies, which are more or less built on gore. Of course, there is the gothic atmosphere of the location, beautiful women and sensuality, and a tender love motif that lends depth to the film’s conclusion, almost foreshadowing the cult climax of some cinematic masterpieces (I don’t want throw out any spoilers). (04/24/2020)

The Italian-Spanish movie Night of the Devils has a very good atmosphere, and you can see that it does more than the average movie. If the British had made this, it might not have been so gruesome, and there would not have been perhaps so many naked women. Although maybe they would have had they made it back in the 1970s. The movie’s makers produced a very explicit movie, which makes this movie work and intriguing even after all these years. At least it will interest fans of horror movies. (10/07/2019)