THE HAZING

October 31st. Five college freshmen want to join a prestigious fraternity, but first they must pass a test: obtain strange objects listed on a list and then spend the Halloween nights inside an abandoned house, once the scene of a bloody massacre. Among the objects on the list is a mysterious book of occultism, kept by a college professor; but the professor is a warlock devoted to black magic who periodically performs human sacrifices in the basement of his home to gain eternal life. When the boys sneak into his house to retrieve the book, they catch him in the act and, in a panic, to defend themselves, they kill him, then escape with the book. Unconcerned about the incident, they head to the house where they are supposed to spend the night, as stipulated by the fraternity clause; but by killing the professor, they have only freed his soul from the mortal remains, which will follow them and begin to possess them one by one, forcing them to eliminate each other. Few will remember "Night of the Demons," a 1987 b-movie that combined broad humor with gore situations to delight every horror fan. Although it was a film with little originality and poor memorability, "Night of the Demons" set a precedent, being cited more than once, voluntarily or not, by many horror films that followed. "The Evil," "The Convent," and who knows how many other films have drawn heavily from that small b-movie, but no one has proposed such an explicit homage to "Night of the Demons" as "Dead Scared" has. Directed in 2004 by Rolfe Kanefsky with a rather low budget, "Dead Scared" is a film that seems made directly in the 1980s, thus making the happiness of many nostalgics of that type of often ingenuous and stylistically elementary films, but damn entertaining and engaging. Today as then, we have to deal with a group of stupid teenagers, who perfectly embody the stereotype wanted by American adolescent cinema: the dumb bully who finds his counterpart in the ditzy girl, the shy boy who is made fun of by everyone, the girl with salt in her head, the capable boy who already knows from the start that he will have the task of solving the situation... this is what appears in the first 20 minutes, but as time goes by, all the premises will be betrayed and the protagonists will turn out to be very different from how they were presented. We never reach psychological depth, this is clear, but we can sense a certain desire on the part of the screenwriter to surprise the viewer by changing the cards in hand and playing with stereotypes. In addition to the obvious references to "Night of the Demons," "Dead Scared" abundantly and openly cites the first two "Evil Dead" (among the objects to be recovered there is also a photo autographed by Bruce Campbell!) and "The Thing," without plundering the films, but simply winking at the horror-loving viewer. The gore department is commendable, enriched with decapitations, dismemberments, liters of blood, and a cult scene in which a girl and a severed tongue with a life of its own, of enormous dimensions and obscenely phallic, are the protagonists; all realized with old-style but effective special effects. Kanefsky's direction is classic and does not allow any particular characteristic to be remembered; the screenplay, on the other hand, alternates moments of sure citational entertainment with a too marked concession to easy buffoonery in the final part, which does not completely seem right, but which nevertheless does not compromise the success of the film. Among the actors, the only known face is represented by Brad Dourif, the unforgettable Charles Lee Ray, that is, the Chucky doll of the "Child's Play" saga when he has human features, here engaged in playing the role of the wicked satanic professor. In short, "Dead Scared" is a small film, with no pretensions but that still manages to entertain the viewer thanks to its clearly 1980s style, the clear citational intent, and the right dose of sex & gore.