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ON THIS DAY IN HORROR - August 22nd

"NIGHT OF THE CREEPS" released in 1986

Inspired by the "creature features" of the 50's and 60's, debut writer/director Fredd Dekker's Night of the Creeps is a homage to the zombie B-movie mixing in takes on slashers and alien invasion films, as an extraterrestrial slug crashes on Earth and proceeds to multiply and take over the bodies of it's victims, turning them into ravenous rampaging zombies!

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In 1959, an alien canister lands on Earth and is discovered by a college prep and his date after mistaking it for a falling star. While his date is attacked by a possessed axe-wielding prison escapee, the Preppy is taken over by the alien after the slug jumps into his mouth. Twenty-seven years later, fraternity pledge Chris Romero (Jason Lively) and his disabled friend James Carpenter "J.C." Hooper (Steve Marshall) attempt to break into the university medical center to steal a cadaver as a pledge stunt. Finding a secret room hidden behind the morgue's freezer, Chris and J.C. find the corpse of the Preppy - which comes to life and tries to grab them! The corpse makes its way back to the sorority house where he picked up his date twenty-seven years ago. There, his head splits open and releases more of the slugs. Called in to investigate the cryogenics lab break-in is jaded detective Ray Cameron (Tom Atkin) finds the corpse and deduces that it is a sick prank pulled by Chris and J.C. The pair are taken in for questioning and they confess to breaking in but deny moving the corpse. Police release Chris and J.C. on the testimony of a janitor that witnessed them running out of the university medical center, "screaming like banshees". J.C. leaves Chris to walk home with his crush Cynthia (Jill Whitlow), but is attacked by an infected undead janitor. The next night, while everyone prepares for a formal dance, Chris finds a recorded message that J.C. posthumously left for him. J.C. says that the slugs have incubated in his brain, but he has discovered that they are susceptible to heat. Enlisting Cameron, Chris and he steal a flamethrower from the police armory and head to Cynthia's sorority house, just a busload of slug-infested zombies from the Delta fraternity show up and start to lay siege to the house!

J.C. Hooper: Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God! Do you think it's taking the Lord's name in vain to say "oh my God" a whole bunch of times really fast like that?

Top:  Chris (Jason Lively) and J.C. (Steve Marshall) find the hidden cryogenic lab;

Above:   Tom Atkin plays Detective Ray Cameron.

Debut director Fred Dekker wrote the script in a single week with his former UCLA classmate Shane Black, which included every B movie cliche the pair could think of and Dekker insisting on directing the script himself. After finding initial success with his screenplay for the horror-comedy House (1986), Tristar Pictures allowed Dekker to helm Night of the Creeps, starring Jason Lively, Jill Whitlow, Steve Marshall and Tom Atkins. Atkins would later state the Night of the Creeps was his favorite of all his films, and was encouraged to improvise with the character - apparently this is why Detective Cameron stops to smell a rose while on his way to examine a dismembered corpse. Make-Up Effects artists Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger would also play Zombie extras during the attack on the sorority house. A fair share of the film was shot in an old Woolworth's department store that was converted into a makeshift studio. And according to Dekker the prominent "Stryper Rules" graffiti visible in the bathroom scene appeared due to makeup artist Kyle Sweet's relationship with future husband, Stryper frontman Michael Sweet. Interestingly, the suspense filled tool shed sequence was filmed after principal shooting on the movie had wrapped. After a rough cut was shown to a test audience, several people thought that the picture needed more action so this particular sequence was added to the movie, with Chris and Cynthia (wielding the flamethrower) start to dispatch zombies left and right. One scene that did not make the cut was the alternate ending which the charred and 'zombified' Cameron is shuffling down the street when he suddenly stops and falls to the ground. His head explodes and the slugs scamper out and head into a cemetery, as the spaceship from the beginning of the film has returned with the aliens intending to retrieve their experiment, proposing a sequel.

Detective Cameron: I got good news and bad news, girls. The good news is your dates are here.
Sorority Sister: What's the bad news?
Detective Cameron: They're dead.

Top:   The girls dates for the formal dance finally show up!;

Above:   Chris and Cynthia (Jill Whitlow) fight off the alien/zombie attack!

Night of the Creeps was very well received by the critics on it's release, garnering mostly positive reviews. Michael Gingold of Fangoria rated it 3.5/4 stars and called it "one of the year's most surprisingly entertaining fright features, one that homaged practically every subgenre imaginable, yet kept a sure hand on its tone and never descended into spoofery." Nathan Rabin of The A.V. Club rated it C+ and wrote, "Night Of The Creeps has all the ingredients of a top-notch cult movie, yet Dekker too often ends up recycling clichés rather than subverting or spoofing them." In a retrospective in 2009, Eric Profancik of DVD Verdict called it "a great flick that deserves its cult status".

Night of the Creeps wasn't the only Fred Dekker script which included zombies attacking humans. Around 1988 he and screenwriter Shane Black worked together on writing a final draft of the script titled Shadow Company. It was actually the first script that Black wrote in 1984, a year before he wrote his first draft of Lethal Weapon (1987). The script was to be an action horror film about a group of US special forces soldiers who died during the Vietnam war and years later after their bodies are brought back the soldiers, who were members of secret army experiments, rise up from the graves as rotting, unstoppable zombies. The zombie soldiers would have raided the armory from a nearby army base and then proceeded to destroy the town in which they were buried, killing everyone in it and wiping it off the ground during Christmas night. The movie was going to be directed by John Carpenter sometime in 1989, produced by Walter Hill (who also did some uncredited work on the script) and with Kurt Russell in the main role, but it was never made. The original script by Black and Dekker did gain a cult following by theirs and Carpenter's fans!

ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE:   69%