NIGHT OF THE CREEPS: A Delicious Sci-Fi Horror Parody

Cinema can be sentimental. It likes to return to the past, tenderly recalling earlier eras, familiar conventions, or specific titles—sometimes seeking in them presumed greatness or attempting to pay homage despite their flaws. James Franco’s The Disaster Artist is the story of one man’s creative passion despite having no clue about filmmaking. Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, released three decades ago, was a funny yet oddly moving portrait of the world’s worst director—though not for Burton himself, for whom Wood seemed a worthy role model in demonstrating the need to present one’s own vision to the world.

Fred Dekker’s debut Night of the Creeps approaches the theme quite differently, abandoning the biopic structure in favor of an homage to B-movie monster films of the 1950s (and beyond), set within a world that feels lifted from a John Hughes teen comedy.

Before Dekker reveals the film’s main plot, he toys with our expectations, shifting genre and convention with each scene. First, we are aboard a spaceship of an unknown alien race (small, ugly beasts), where one alien flees his kin, sending a container of unknown contents into space. The next scene takes us to 1959, where two students are on a date in a car. A radio report tells of a dangerous inmate’s escape from the asylum, and a falling star from the sky turns out not to be a star at all. The lovers soon face grim fates—she becomes the madman’s target, he is attacked by the slimy contents of the cosmic container.

A further jump brings us to 1986, the filmmakers’ present day: a college party offers two ungainly heroes a chance to meet someone.

Chris (Jason Lively) quickly notices the charming Cynthia (Jill Whitlow) and decides, with his buddy James (Steve Marshall), to pledge a fraternity to stand a chance. Their initiation task is to break into a nearby lab and steal human cadavers—only to discover a thirty-year-old corpse harboring a nasty parasite. Before long, the entire campus faces threats from both zombie victims and alien slugs.

Dekker, who wrote and directed the film, takes his time setting the action in motion, focusing on disorienting the audience with each new scene—but that is precisely the charm of Night of the Creeps.

This tribute to cheap sci-fi horror does not attempt to rehabilitate their naiveté but rather emphasizes it, deceiving us about both genre and story—though never about its quality. The aliens in the prologue wear rubber suits and create the same illusion of realism as Japanese Godzilla; the 1959 scenes are deliberately stripped of color and convincing acting; and the stylized eighties vibe hits even harder today than when the film was made.

Moreover, it is hard to take seriously a story where even the characters’ names are quotations in themselves—while I might have believed the fictional Corman University, one cannot help but laugh aloud at the protagonists’ names: Christopher Romero, James Carpenter Hooper, Cynthia Cronenberg, and even detectives Cameron and Landis, Officer Raimi, and Constable Miner—all deliberate nods to famous directors, signaling the cinematic world Dekker evokes. Borrowings abound: the method of infection by an alien slug echoes David Cronenberg’s Shivers, and the returning killer subplot is pure slasher.

My favorite touch is casting Tom Atkins, John Carpenter’s go-to actor in The Fog and Halloween III (and from the ensemble of Escape from New York). Here, as Detective Cameron—gruff and haunted by past demons—he steals the show from the young actors, both fitting perfectly into the mad horror-comedy and raising Dekker’s film to a level far beyond what it had any right to be. Perhaps that is why, despite its playful nature, Atkins knows when to hit more dramatic notes, becoming, out of necessity, the film’s pillar. Fortune favors him with the best lines, from the ever-repeated Thrill me to the dialogue that became a tagline:

I have good news and bad news, girls. The good news is, your dates are already here.

And the bad news? They are dead.

Night of the Creeps does not enjoy the cult status of other eighties horror-comedies—such as Re-Animator or Return of the Living Dead—perhaps paradoxically because of its greatest strength: its embrace of quotation. Dekker’s love for genre cinema is postmodern—before such a term was in vogue—dressing a typical teens-rom-com in horror and fantasy trappings. At the same time, these elements remain distinct from one another, making it difficult for viewers to emotionally invest, as one never knows what to expect in the next scene.

Nonetheless, Dekker manages to surprise us emotionally several times, thanks to actors who do more than mug for laughs. Above all, Night of the Creeps is about playing with clichés, putting them side by side to see the result. Through it all runs genuine respect for cinema—least of all can one call it unworthy of that reverence.

A year later Dekker made the popular Monster Squad, tackling famed monsters (Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy) and pitting them against a gang of kids.

Co-written with his friend Shane Black, its script is more coherent than that of his first film, yet still an exercise in tribute and quotation.