Thrill Me!

Night of the Creeps (1986) Dir. Fred Dekker

Alien slugs crash land in 1950s America and infect a man who is then cryogenically frozen. 27 years later, in 1986, two college nerds inadvertently awaken him and unleash alien slug zombie chaos on the students of Corman University.

“Zombies, exploding heads, creepy-crawlies... and a date for the formal.” - Detective Cameron

Happy Halloween!

I feel like the past month of Grave Offerings has probably painted an accurate, if intense, picture of the kind of horror I respond to and enjoy. If there are any non-horror fans who have been reading, I hope it’s made you feel differently about horror and encouraged you to take a chance on one or two of the picks. 

I’m aware a lot of the films, or at least, the way I’ve discussed them, have touched on some incredibly heavy topics. That’s part of my love of the genre: having a way to immerse myself in subjects and experiences I find difficult or fill me with anxiety - but with the guard rails of genre conventions.

But sometimes I think we all just want/need a bit of empty-headed, horror silliness. Yes, the world is full of horrors, but we don’t always need that reflected in our pop culture. Escapism is necessary and important too. This has been an awful and heartbreaking month for humanity that is showing no signs of getting better. So I think we all deserve a dumb, trashy, splatterfest.

That’s difficult to find sometimes, because if you’re trying to find something approaching the 1980s schlocky horror of your imagination - the kind of VHS slumber party nonsense that revels in practical effects and wooden acting - it can be a minefield of wading through casual eighties bigotry.

Enter: Night of the Creeps.

A movie that plays like a half-remembered dream of every B movie ever made - which is intentional, as writer/director Fred Dekker specifically wanted to include every B movie trope he could think of. It wears its horror devotion on its sleeve with groan-worthy character surnames name checking every genre maestro of the era.

While it doesn’t take itself too seriously, it’s still trying to make a good film and ensure you care about the characters. That’s a tough tightrope to walk but it just about manages it. Harder still is not ageing too badly for the sensibilities of 2023. On this, Night of the Creeps holds up better than most. There’s an element of the toxic Revenge of the Nerds culture that would eventually calcify and form the basis of the rotten, red-pilled dregs of the internet, but the film seems to be relatively conscious of that. With the best friend of the central character trying, mostly in vain, to encourage the protagonist to maybe just talk to the woman he has a crush on and treat her like a human being. It’s still clearly made exclusively to appeal to teenage boys in the eighties, so when I say it is less objectionable than its peers, this is all relative.  

“I got good news and bad news, girls. The good news is your dates are here.” - Detective Cameron

“What's the bad news?” - Sorority Sister

“They're dead.” - Detective Cameron

The big joy of the film is Tom Atkins - clearly having fun playing the gruff, weary, and broken Detective Cameron. He gets the majority of the best lines and stomps around scenes with an assured sense of knowing exactly what film he’s in. Yet there’s a genuine sense of melancholy to him too. 

“I had written the character as this winking homage to a Raymond Chandler detective. He was kind of glib and flippant on the page. But when Tom came in, not only did he say the lines exactly as I had heard them when I wrote the script, he also brought this sadness to the character. I realised that he could make the difference between a cult movie that’s winking at you and a cult movie that actually has something bubbling under the surface that’s powerful and human.” - Fred Dekker

I think the title and the fact that all the obnoxious frat boys end up being slug-controlled zombie pests gestures towards saying something about the noxious college environment of the 1980s.

“Don’t these creeps take no for an answer?” - Cynthia

But let’s not get too carried away. There’s no big theme or sub-text here. Ultimately, the film very much wants you to switch your brain off.

If you’re having a few friends over for a Halloween Party, this is the sort of film to have on in the background. You can talk over and ignore it, knowing you’ll never be lost and when you tune back in, you’ll no doubt get a chance to laugh with or at it in one form or another. Halloween Party nights need to thread the needle for the scaredy cats, the casual horror watchers and the true horror sickos. I think this has something for everyone.

Sometimes you just need something fun, schlocky, and smart-dumb while you loudly munch popcorn.

The finale doesn’t disappoint either, with Chris Romero and Cynthia Cronenberg, in full prom-style formal wear, flamethrowing zombie jocks with abandon.

“Thrill me.” - Detective Cameron

Where can I watch it in the UK?

You can rent it for £2.49 or buy it for £4.99 on Amazon.

Pairs well with

I think a good Halloween Party double bill would be to stick with mind-controlling alien slugs and go with 1990s classic The Faculty (1999, dir. Robert Rodriguez, available to stream for free on Now/Sky). It’s a smarter film than Night of the Creeps and rewards your attention, but it has a similar lightness of touch that never entirely crosses into pastiche.

A perfect premise (what if your teachers and parents really were aliens?) that allows for a lot of exploring teen archetypes, cliques, and the indoctrination of high school. It’s pro-drug, with a subversive message about the way American towns can value sports over education.

This is Invasion of the Body Snatchers via The Breakfast Club with a sprinkling of Kevin Williamson’s nineties postmodernism. Save for a bizarre and conformist coda that betrays the surviving characters (very in keeping with The Breakfast Club’s ending actually), I unashamedly love this film and all its oddities. 

While you can absolutely enjoy The Faculty as a solid high school sci-fi horror - presenting it as a Halloween Party viewing gives you all sorts of shared-with-friends delights: What is Josh Hartnett’s hair doing exactly?, “Guaranteed to jack you up”, is that… John Stewart?!, Famke Janssen’s The Thing head…

It’s a fun time that caters to the horror scaredy cats and fans of the genre alike.

Further Reading

• The Faculty of Horror talk The Faculty on their Smells Like Teen Spirit episode. 
• Fun behind-the-scenes b-roll of the making of The Faculty.
• The Faculty is the bleakest and most subversive film of the ’90s studio teen-horror cycle - a good piece on AV Club that makes a compelling argument that the conformist coda of the film is bleak and nihilistic by design.

And that’s the final Grave Offering of October 2023!

Thanks so much for reading along, liking, commenting, emailing and sharing the substack. I really appreciate it.

There’s one more postscript entry I’ll be sending out tomorrow with some bonus, unused illustrations and a few last thoughts, so I’ll save any final comments for that.

Hope you all have a dreadful (complimentary) Halloween.

And remember, horror films are for life, not just for Halloween.