Heralding their DVD and Blu-ray release of the mentalist gonzo Italian horrors Demons and Demons 2, Arrow Video have announced a much-belated Demons 3 as part of the package. Sadly, it's a two-part comic rather than a full-blown feature, but 26 years after the second film, it's still something of an event.
Demons, released in 1985, was the peculiar brainchild of Dario Argento and Lamberto Bava (son of Mario), and was about a group of cinema patrons being possessed and mutated into murderous beasts by the film they were watching. We kind of felt like that during Paul Anderson's** Three Musketeers**. Demons 2 followed a year later, and extended the premise to people watching TV in a tower block. Both films are very high on gore and very low on logic, which has done nothing but help their cult success. They're almost the ultimate WTF movies.
Several films called themselves Demons 3 in the aftermath. There was Bava's own The Ogre in 1988; the Argento-produced The Church in 1989; and Umberto Lenzi's Black Demons in 1991. All of those are spurious though: they're stand-alone films with the Demons label slapped on them. So Arrow's comic is the first Demons 3 to be considered canon, if you consider such things important.
Where to go after the movie theatre and the tower block? Why medieval France, obviously, with Nostradamus as its visionary hero. "Amid the carnage of the plague, a new evil is starting to take form, and only Nostradamus can see it..." If it's eschewing the claustrophobic settings of the films, it's actually tying in with the plots of the films within the films, and it's at least suitably loony.
Stefan Hutchinson and Barry Keating wrote the story, and the artwork is by Jeff Zornow and Peter Fielding (the same team produced a Day Of The Dead comic for Arrow in 2010). The Demons discs are out on April 20, and the comics will be in the boxes.
