#Hooptober9

💀 NUMBER TWENTY THREE 💀
💀 ONE FILM BY BILL REBANE 💀

"The Demons Of Ludlow" (1983)
* dir: Bill Rebane
* Horror / Supernatural / "The Fog", But Make It Pilgrims
[ ★★★ / ★★★★★ ]

You can tell the piano is haunted because it sounds like a symphony of cheap pump organs whenever somebody sits down to play it.

Look, "The Demons Of Ludlow" is weird. It's kind of skeevy. It takes a couple of interesting narrative and aesthetic swings (love those glowing green hands and all them bloody claws!). But it could honestly stand to be a bit more skeevy and/or a lot weirder, and the swings it does take are hardly the first of their kind when talking about this specific era of genre filmmaking. (It's basically a slasher masquerading as a ghost story, and even that wasn't exactly novel by the year 1983.)

What you DO have here are a handful of solid performances, a wonderfully evocative snowy Wisconsin wintertime setting, a great score, and some nice visual effects that are notably punching above their weight class when you consider the miniscule budget for this thing. All held together by Bill Rebane's grounded yet sneakily ambitious directorial style, always having a steady hand on the wheel even when fundamentalist demons are stoning a woman to death with a basket of rocks in her own smoke-choked bedroom right before the roof suddenly cracks open to let in a massive spectral arm that proceeds to drag her through the hole into somewhere beyond.

Talk about life imitating art! Who HASN'T been there?

"The Demons Of Ludlow" isn't some sort of undiscovered classic, but I ain't mad at it. If nothing else, it's certainly piqued my curiosity regarding the rest of Rebane's non-MST3K adjacent filmography. He made a talking monster truck movie called "Twister's Revenge"! Run don't walk, I say.