Demons (1985)

A sealed movie theater in West Berlin, a cursed mask in the lobby, and a paying audience that becomes the buffet. Lamberto Bava's Demons arrives with the efficiency of a man who knows exactly what the customer wants and has no intention of discussing it afterward. The premise is a closed loop of appetite: patrons watch a horror film about demons, the screen's logic leaks into the aisles, and the aisles fill with teeth. Dario Argento produced and co-wrote, and his fingerprints show in the neon corridors and the aggressive synth cues. This is a machine for delivering gore, and it delivers with a straight face and a bucket.

The cast includes Geretta Geretta in a supporting role, a Black actress whose presence is treated as nothing more than a body in the wrong row at the wrong time. The film does not pause to remark on it. Nobody pauses for anything. Women scream, flee, and are possessed alongside the men, and the film advances no thesis about gender, race, class, or the environment. The theater itself is a monument to consumption, but the movie has no interest in critiquing it. The demons are not metaphors for late capitalism. They are demons. They want to bite you.

Watching it now, decades later, produces a strange serenity. Here is a horror film with no message, no lesson, and no invitation to improve yourself before the credits. It simply wants to put a possessed woman on a motorcycle and send her into a lobby. The absence of moral instruction is not a failing. It is a kind of honesty, rare and, in its own modest way, restful.