Right from the start, The Night of the Devils is a room-clearer, announcing its intentions to the audience with a nightmarish montage of full-frontal nudity and graphic violence, complete with an exploding head and a ripped-out beating heart. “Don’t like it?” the film seems to say. “It’s best you leave now.”
Indeed, the Italian Gothic horror film from director Giorgio Ferroni (Mill of the Stone Women) is envelope-pushing for its time, rubbing your face in close-ups of unflinching gore and pressed flesh.
Gianni Garko (Devil Fish) literally stumbles into the story as Nicola, an amnesiac brought to a mental institution. Taking up most of the running time, a flashback reveals how he got there: Swerving to miss a woman in the woods, he experiences car trouble, and ventures to a nearby, rundown village for help. There, they keep the windows barred as protection against what plagues the night.
The Night of the Devils draws inspiration from Aleksei Tolstoy’s “The Wurdulak,” a story that also informed the Boris Karloff-starring segment of Mario Bava’s 1963 anthology film, Black Sabbath. The similarity isn’t readily apparent until the flashback begins. Whereas the Bava adaptation feels a little long in the tooth, this feature-length version ironically is the more successful telling. —Rod Lott