You might assume that the ideal way to watch the 1985 supernatural Italo horror Demons would be to see it projected in the oldest operating cinema in town, in our case the original location of The Prytania.  In the film, a group of strangers are gifted free tickets to a mysterious horror film at an ancient cinema that has materialized out of the urban void.  That movie turns out to be a gory cheapie about an ancient mask buried in Nostradamus’s tomb.  We watch this story unfold twice removed, where movie-within-a-movie victims try on the cursed mask, which transforms them into demonic, flesh-eating demons who torment their companions.  Meanwhile, the in-film audience of the movie squirms in their seats, noticing an alarming resemblance of the mysterious horror film’s violence to their own journeys to the screening.  Mainly, the promotional mask prop displayed in the cinema’s lobby has cut one of their cheeks the same way it cut & infected characters in the film they’re watching, which of course leads to a demon-zombie breakout in the theater that matches the chaos of the movie within the movie.  They’re all effectively Skinamarinked—unable to leave the theater thorough the doors they entered from—as they individually transform into cannibalistic monsters and tear each other to shreds.  Seeing Demons in a classic single-screener cinema could only add an extra layer of uncanny meta-horror to that gory practical-effects display, especially if the cinema in question could cover the insurance costs of blocking the exits and cutting their customer’s cheeks at the box office.

It turns out there’s an even better way to see Demons, though, one that trades in the layered meta-aesthetics of a haunted cinema for the open-aired joviality of a family barbeque.  Italian prog rock composer Claudio Simonetti recently toured one of the several undead mutations of his band Goblin to play live accompaniment for Demons in concert venues around the country, including The Broad’s outdoor extension The Broadside.  The show was rigidly timed to a Tim & Eric style video package that opens with a postcard from Simonetti & Demons director Lamberto Bava, then concludes with a greatest-hits medley of 70s & 80s horror scores, most of which Simonetti composed under the Goblin name.  In-between, the band played a reworked, bulked-up version of the Demons score to a full screening of the film, emphasizing both how few scenes prompted them to pause for dialogue and how frequently its now-anthemic theme is repeated for the gnarliest sequences of over-the-top gore.  As for Demons itself, it’s got one of the greatest opening acts in all of nonsense Italo horror cinema, capturing the feeling of collectively dreaming at the movies without distracting itself with minor concerns like plot & coherence.  Once the in-film movie projector and auditorium are torn apart there isn’t much glue to hold the whole thing together, though, save for the repetition in Simonetti’s synth riffs, so it was great to hear them cranked up to an obnoxious volume.  By the end, the familiarity of those riffs gave the screening a celebratory, communal air – the culmination of a once-in-a-lifetime Halloween season of great movies screening at The Broad (including several directed by Demons producer Dario Argento).

Years ago, the hot horror-nerd ticket would have been to see the full classic Goblin line-up play a live score for Suspriria, a tour that (to my knowledge) never came through New Orleans.  If you’re going to see “Claudio Simonetti’s Goblin” live instead (a variation of the band that only includes Simonetti from Goblin’s original membership), you might as well see them play a live score for Demons, since it’s a film that Simonetti scored after the legendary band had originally broken up.  He might primarily be a solo composer, but you can tell Simonetti loves having a full band behind him, playing rockstar in his denim jacket & wallet chain combo.  The encore set after Demons concluded touched on plenty of classic-Goblin staples, including themes from Dawn of the Dead, Suspriria, and (in my book, their finest work) Deep Red.  It also included some wonderfully bizarre choices that rivaled Bava’s shoddy surrealist filmmaking in Demons, most notably in the glitchy-GIF repetition of the classic New Line Cinema logo while performing the theme from Cut & Run and in their prog rock remix of John Carpenter’s Halloween score, transforming a notoriously sparse piano line into an overcomplicated monster.  I still would love to see Demons projected in an antique venue like The Prytania someday, just for the proper sense of ambiance.  I can’t imagine it’ll be a more memorable or endearing evening than that evening at The Broadside, though, where the stage lights twinkling off Simonetti’s absurdly long wallet chain were like stars twinkling in the night sky.

-Brandon Ledet