Demon Knight is a strange pick for a Tales From The Crypt movie. The first big screen adaptation of the EC horror comics since Freddie Francis’ 1972 British anthology, Demon Knight played fast and loose with the Crypt Keeper’s formula, which had fueled six seasons of horror on HBO. On the series, executive producers Robert Zemeckis, Walter Hill, Richard Donner, David Giler, and Joel Silver tore stories directly from the pages of EC, updating frights from The Vault Of Horror with all the sex, nudity, and violence that premium cable would allow. The show’s Monster Of Ceremonies, The Crypt Keeper (voiced by John Kassir), told morality tales involving antiheroes sentenced to death by ironic comeuppance at the hands of an Old Testament universe, a whole family of Tim Currys, or, simply, someone greedier and more conniving than they. But for Cryptie’s big-screen debut, director Ernest Dickerson delivered something truly shocking: An original story with a happy ending where the Black character doesn’t simply survive, she saves the world.
Demon Knight‘s story is better suited for the pages of Blade than EC, primarily because it’s rich in Biblical mythology and demonic action. It concerns a lineage of Chosen Ones bound by the stars to protect an ancient flask containing the blood of Jesus, which is demon Kryptonite. Like a demented Passover, a bit of blood on the threshold of a door will keep demons from entering. The plot sounds more fitting for the action-based horror movies appearing in Demon Knight‘s wake: One can find Demon DNA in From Dusk Till Dawn, Constantine, Spawn, and most recently Sinners, which similarly follows a diverse group of outcasts besieged by hellspawn on the fringes of society.
Tales From The Crypt was never the most welcoming place for Black characters. The Crypt Keeper often told of hubristic white people meeting their ironic demise for perpetrating grifts, affairs, or murders. But where 1995’s Tales From The Hood had Rusty Cundieff, a Black filmmaker, handling these subjects with a knowing hand, Tales From The Crypt had Robert Zemeckis, who’s not exactly known for his deft portrayal of racial issues. It wouldn’t be until deep into the second season of the HBO series that Black characters got their own Low-Budget Tale Of Clichéd Horror with “Fitting Punishment.”
As for Demon Knight‘s script by Ethan Reiff, Cyrus Voris, and Mark Bishop, it actually predates the HBO series by two years. Unlike Francis’ decades-earlier film, the ’90s Tales From The Crypt movies wouldn’t be anthologies. Each film in a proposed new trilogy would be one extended episode, complete with Crypt Keeper bookends. Originally and ironically, the script for From Dusk Till Dawn was to form the basis for the first of the cycle. That was, until Quentin Tarantino became the Oscar-winning auteur, skyrocketing his asking price out of the series’ range. Producers then went with a different original screenplay that, like Dusk Till Dawn, featured abrupt tonal shifts outfitted in Near Dark‘s Western aesthetics. Give them credit for consistency though, because Dickerson was also an offbeat director choice. Coming up as Spike Lee’s cinematographer, shooting films like Do The Right Thing and Malcolm X, Dickerson planted his flag as a filmmaker with the 1992 teen crime drama Juice. Working off a script unburdened from Tales tropes, Dickerson could quietly shape the story around his interests while paying homage to the comics.
Like many TV adaptations, the Tales From The Crypt end of Demon Knight stretches its legs, literally, to show off its cinematic qualities. Now walking on two legs, in the film’s most grotesque effect, the Crypt Keeper introduces his story from a film set, where he offers bullhorn stage direction to John Larroquette and presents a rough cut of the film he’s working on: Demon Knight. The actual film, too, would show off its expansiveness by shifting from drawing room mystery in the New Mexican desert to Assault On Precinct 13-style siege thriller to a finale worthy of Predator. The story opens on a lonely stretch of desert highway. After a fiery car chase, Brayker (William Sadler), keeper of the magic flask, lands at the doorstep of Irene’s (C.C.H. Pounder) boarding house, bringing The Collector (a Beetlejuice-like Billy Zane) with him. After revealing his demonic power by punching a hole, Riki-Oh-style, through a local Sheriff’s head, the Collector summons a horde of spindly, green-eyed demons to infiltrate Irene’s sanctuary.
It’s a testament to the cast that Zane doesn’t swallow the movie whole with his velvety, Robin Williams-inspired Mr. Scratch. The Collector is the most Tales From The Crypt part of the film, and he leads the boarders through little one-shots of acidic terror. Each of the boarders is an archetype one could find in the Crypt: a lonely mailman threatening to go postal (Charles Fleischer), a sex worker with a heart of gold (Brenda Bakke), and Jeryline (Jada Pinkett), an ex-con on work release. But Dickerson treats their stories as tragic and their complicity as understandable. These outcasts are eking out a meager life in a boarding house run by a screaming C.C.H. Pounder. Who could blame them for wishing on a monkey’s paw? When The Collector offers up their innermost desires, whether it be true love or a drink surrounded by many beautiful topless women, they are helpless to resist. The Collector’s hallucinatory temptations allow Dickerson some variety in his locations. Shooting in an airplane hangar in Van Nuys, Dickerson had complete control of the lighting and camera setups and lends an eerie horror-comics aesthetic through rich day-for-night blues and canted angles. This homage becomes most pronounced when a character picks up an issue of Tales From The Crypt and finds their demise and Dickerson’s shot compositions mirrored in its pages.
But beyond its look and impact on the horror-action subgenre, Demon Knight was ahead of its time, with Dickerson Trojan Horsing in a revolutionary idea: A Black Final Girl who could challenge convention. The early ’90s were a boom time for horror, with The Silence Of The Lambs and Bram Stoker’s Dracula bringing massive audiences, and yet—aside from cliché “Black guy dies first” roles and the occasional Candyman that would push themes of racial injustice to the fore, there weren’t many Black people in the genre spotlight, especially as survivors. But things were changing. Almost a decade before Scream made the Final Girl trope a household term, Carol J. Clover defined it in her 1987 article “Her Body, Himself: Gender In The Slasher Film” (and would further explore it in her seminal book Men, Women, and Chain Saws), using slashers like Black Christmas, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Friday The 13th. These heroines were exclusively white and sexually pure, something Dickerson had the opportunity to correct.
Among the first Black Final Girls, Jeryline is far from the virginal Laurie Strode. She instead has the assertiveness and confidence of someone who has definitely had sex before, balancing The Collector’s zaniness with her commanding constitution. She’s presented as someone living a hard life, who’s made mistakes and continues to make them. Yet she’s also a survivor. After Brayker knights her as Chosen One, Jeryline echoes one of horror’s most beloved female heroes, Alien‘s Ellen Ripley. Like Ripley, she strips to her underwear for her final standoff with The Collector. However, Dickerson doesn’t present this as leeringly as Ridley Scott; it has a plot function. Jeryline covers herself in the blood of Jesus and goes straight after her Predator. After vanquishing her foe, she hits the road, blessing the threshold of her Greyhound, as a new Black Collector (Mark David Kennerly) attempts to board. She lives, as the Crypt Keeper says and so few Black horror characters do, happily ever after.
Demon Knight was a modest hit at the box office, and a sequel, name-checked in Cryptie’s outro, was being written before the studio opted to make the atomic bomb Bordello Of Blood, in which Dennis Miller cleansed cinemas of Crypt movies. Similarly, Hollywood took great pains to erase Dickerson’s forward progress, killing Pinkett off in the opening scene of Scream 2 just two years later. Nevertheless, Demon Knight‘s legacy grew thanks to its original characters and boundless imagination. “I was happy to do the first film where an African-American woman saves the world,” Dickerson said. To boils and ghouls everywhere, this still feels revolutionary 30 years later.
