Night Of The Demon is a 1980 low-budget horror movie directed by James C. Wasson and written by Mike Williams, presenting a gory and occasionally quite unsettling take on the Bigfoot legend. Presented in flashback, the film tells the story of an anthropology class's all-too-successful expedition into the American wilderness to find the truth behind the Sasquatch legend. Along the way, the team learn about the creature's previous victims, uncover the squalid story of a hermit (Crazy Wanda) who gave birth to a mutation after being raped by the monster, and finally come face to face with the beast himself. Despite its technical shortcomings and frequently inane screenplay, Wasson's one and only film remains an engaging experience. Beneath the shoddy acting and muddled plotting, Night Of The Demon has a solid core of subversive unpleasantness, and the last half hour of the film contrives an atmosphere of genuine nihilistic gloom and foreboding. The scenes that the film has become most famous for, however, are another matter entirely - the depictions of castration, dismemberment and disembowelling are hardly convincing, but they are extremely graphic and helped to propel the film (released on video in the UK by Iver Film Services) onto the video nasties list. The film remained banned until 1993, when Vipco resubmitted it to the British Board of Film Classification, who agreed to pass it with an 18 certificate as long as almost two minutes of gory mayhem was deleted. Video nasty was a term coined in the United Kingdom in the 1980s that originally applied to a number of films distributed on video that were held by some to be unfit for domestic viewing. ...
The majority of Horror films are fantasies where we accept supernatural ghosts, demons and monsters as part of a deal we've made with the authors: They dress the fantasy in an attractive guise and arrange the variables into an interesting pattern, and we agree to play along for the sake of enjoyment.
Night of the Demon is the version to watch for both content and quality.
The long-shot demon is sometimes called the bicycle demon because he's a rod puppet with legs that move on a wheel-rig.
Night of the Demon turned out to be a very moody and clever horror film, with a really intelligent and well written screenplay, the dialogues here are exceptional and the sense of humor perfect.
Tourneur never wanted to show the demon and it feels like that, the first death scene could have been brilliant if there wasn't any demon in it, it spoils all the suspense and all the supernatural angle of the film is already revealed at the beginning.
Night of the Demon is a perfect masterpiece flawed by one tiny element (the demon), it's a great film noir horror that has a perfect script and perfect direction to make it one of the best horror films ever made.