Night of the Creeps: The Slug-Zombie Homage

The students at the college in this film attend Corman University. The detective is called Cameron. The hero is Chris Romero, his best friend is James Carpenter Hooper, the girl is Cynthia Cronenberg, and the supporting police are named Landis and Raimi. A film that does this in its first twenty minutes is making a promise it almost certainly cannot keep, and for about a decade I assumed Night of the Creeps was exactly what it looks like from the outside: a reference machine, a video-shop shelf with a plot stapled to it.

That reading is wrong, and the thing that proves it is Tom Atkins. Fred Dekker’s 1986 debut has one genuinely great element that has nothing to do with the in-jokes, and it is a middle-aged cop who is so tired of his own life that the arrival of alien slug-zombies reads to him as a scheduling problem.

The setup, without giving anything away

The film opens in 1959, in black and white, on a spaceship, where something small and unpleasant gets ejected in a canister towards Earth. It lands near a lovers’ lane. Simultaneously, an axe murderer has escaped from a nearby asylum. Dekker runs both threads into each other in about seven minutes of monochrome and then cuts, hard, to 1986 and a fraternity pledge week at Corman University, where two hopeless freshmen are told to steal a body from the medical school’s cryogenics lab as an initiation stunt.

That is all the plot you need in advance. The film’s engine is that the 1959 material is a loaded gun left on the mantelpiece for twenty-seven years, and Dekker fires it with real economy. The switch from black-and-white fifties pastiche to eighties colour is done in a single cut and never mentioned again, which is the correct amount of attention to draw to a good idea.

Why the pastiche works when it usually does not

Homage is the cheapest move in genre film-making and the easiest to get wrong. The failure mode is a picture that spends its credit on recognition — you clock the reference, you feel clever, and nothing has actually happened on screen. Night of the Creeps mostly avoids this through two decisions.

First, the names are load-bearing furniture rather than punchlines. Nobody in the film points at them. Detective Cameron is never introduced with a nudge. The surnames exist as a private ledger between Dekker and the audience, and the film’s dialogue proceeds as though they are just names, which means the joke costs the picture nothing in momentum. Compare this to the reference comedies of the following decade, which stop dead to explain themselves.

Second, Dekker steals structure rather than imagery. The film’s real theft is from the fifties alien-invasion picture — the canister from space, the small town, the authority figure who will not listen — grafted onto the mid-eighties campus slasher. Those two forms should be incompatible. They fit because Dekker gives the fifties half its own era and its own film stock and lets the eighties half inherit only the consequences. The parasite arrives with fifties logic and lands in a world with sororities and a formal dance, and the collision does the work that neither genre could do alone.

The slugs themselves are the third good decision. They are small, fast and entirely practical, and they go into mouths. Dekker understands that the terror of a parasite film lives in the anticipation of the entry, so he shows the approach and cuts on the moment of contact, over and over, until the audience is doing the work. The head-bursting effects are latex-and-cable jobs of their period and they look like it. They also look present, in a room, which is the argument the practical-gore essay keeps making and which this film supports without trying.

The prologue deserves its own note, because it is the best-directed seven minutes Dekker ever shot. The 1959 sequence is played in black and white with period lenses and period blocking, and Dekker resists every opportunity to send it up. The teenagers at the lovers’ lane are written with the stiff sincerity of an actual 1959 picture, the asylum escape is reported over a car radio in the flat register of the era’s exposition, and the axe murderer is glimpsed rather than displayed. Nothing in the sequence tells you it is a pastiche. It simply is one, performed with a straight face, and it establishes a debt the film spends the next eighty minutes collecting.

Tom Atkins is the whole film

Detective Ray Cameron is a man carrying a 1959 event into 1986 and it has hollowed him out. Atkins plays him with a specific kind of professional exhaustion: he answers his phone with a flat “Thrill me”, he treats the escalating catastrophe as one more shift, and he never once performs disbelief. This last point is the film’s smartest bit of writing. In most horror, the police exist to disbelieve, which wastes half an hour. Cameron believes immediately. He has been waiting.

Atkins had spent the preceding years in John Carpenter’s orbit, and he brings that register with him: the man who has already seen the thing and has decided to be functional about it. Give him a lesser actor’s line reading and the character becomes a joke about hard-boiled cops. Atkins plays him as a genuinely sad man who is good at his job and has no life outside it, and the film quietly builds its emotional spine out of that. The comedy in the picture is all around Cameron. He is never in on it.

Jason Lively and Steve Marshall carry the student half competently; Marshall’s J.C., who uses crutches and gets the film’s best deadpan material, is written with more interior life than the form requires. Jill Whitlow’s Cynthia is handed the flamethrower and the lawnmower and does the necessary work with both. Dick Miller turns up, because it is a 1986 American genre picture and Dick Miller is in it.

The real ancestor of this is a 1959 double bill

The film wears The Return of the Living Dead on its sleeve — the reanimated dead, the comic register, the containment-failure premise — and the debt is real, arriving as it does a year later. But the deeper ancestor is the era the prologue is set in: the American invasion picture of the late fifties, where the threat comes down in a container and the town is too busy with its own social calendar to notice. The Blob is the obvious cousin, and It Came from Outer Space is the more thoughtful one. Dekker’s contribution is the realisation that the fifties invasion film and the eighties body-count film share a chassis — an outside force, a closed community, a rising tally — and that you can weld them if you respect both.

The other side of the family is The Hidden, which arrives in 1987 and takes the parasite-plus-cop idea somewhere considerably harder and better. Watched back to back the two films make a genuine argument about what the parasite plot is for: Dekker uses it for a campus farce, Jack Sholder uses it for a study of appetite. Both are right. And for the wider map, the infection-narrative essay covers where all this ends up.

Dekker’s own career is the postscript. He wrote House the same year and wrote and directed The Monster Squad in 1987, which does the fifties-versus-eighties collision again with Universal’s back catalogue instead of alien slugs. Both films failed commercially on release. Both are now permanent fixtures on the repertory circuit, which is the ordinary fate of American genre pictures that arrive four years early.

The case against

The film is uneven in a way that the affection around it tends to sand off. The middle act loses shape; there is a stretch of fraternity material that plays like a different, worse film about a formal dance. The romance between Chris and Cynthia is inert. Some of the pledge-week comedy has aged into something merely loud. And the picture’s reference layer, while cheap to run, does put a ceiling on it: this is a film about other films, and it never quite develops an argument of its own beyond craft and delight.

The defence is that craft and delight are enough when they are this consistent, and that Atkins’s performance drags a genre exercise into the vicinity of real feeling. There is a version of this film that is a nudge and a wink for ninety minutes. Dekker made the version where the cop is heartbroken.

Spoilers below

The 1959 thread resolves in the way the structure demands: the boy who took the slug in the prologue is the frozen body the pledges steal, and Cameron was the young officer who found what the axe murderer did to Pam that night — the woman he was involved with. He killed the murderer and buried the whole business, along with himself. Every choice he makes in 1986 is a man being handed a second attempt at the worst night of his life. When he goes into the sorority house at the end, he is finishing 1959, and the alien problem is incidental to him.

The film’s ending exists in two forms, and this is the thing worth knowing before you buy a disc. The theatrical version ends with the house destroyed and a coda that plays as a standard eighties sting. Dekker’s original ending, restored on the 2009 home-video release, ends with the alien ship returning to collect what it lost, which is a colder and much stranger finish that reframes the entire film as a retrieval operation in which the humans were never the point. The restored ending is better. It also explains the prologue properly, which the theatrical cut leaves as decoration.

Both endings are cheerfully unearned in the way this kind of picture always is. The difference is that one of them is a joke and the other is a shrug from the universe, and the shrug suits the film.

Where to watch

The disc situation is good and the director’s cut is the one to hunt for; it has been the standard on physical releases since 2009 and turns up on streaming rentals intermittently. Double-bill it with The Hidden for the parasite argument, or with Re-Animator if you want the year’s other case for laughing at a corpse.