“Attack of the Demons” or Why You Shouldn’t Attend Halloween Music Festivals in Small Towns with Lots of Caves and Bats

Horrors films have often been viewed as reflections of what’s cooking up the most paranoia in society at the time of their release. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) has forever been designated as a political allegory on Americans’ fear of Communism.

Ernest Matjijs in his lengthy Cinema Journal essay, “AIDS References in the Critical Reception of David Cronenberg” (2003), notes how The Fly (1986) caused numerous reviewers to make the disease tie-in. The “Horror” segment of Todd Haynes’s Poison (1991), with a scientist creating a fatal epidemic after swallowing his own experimental sex serum, was never meant to be otherwise.

Indie rocker Natalie doesn’t want her music-critic boyfriend dead but . . . .

Then earlier this year we had Amy Seimetz’s She Dies Tomorrow about a contagious thought that causes its victims to be quite sure they only have 24 more hours to live. This causes the antiheroine to ponder what style leather jacket she’d like to have her dead body made into. This clearly, whether intentionally or not, is one of the first coronavirus tie-ins.

So why not add Attack of the Demons to what will be an ever-growing genre: the CD-19 scream flick?

Directed and animated by the immensely talented Eric Power, Attack has been decreed by The Scariest Things website as a “unique artisan-crafted animated cut-paper gore” offering that “worships at the altar of Dario Argento and Sam Raimi.” Who am I to argue otherwise?

In the past, there were demon killers. Then came the millennials.

Imagine a 75-minute South Park episode that spoofs 1950s alien invasion films but without the series’ obscenities, sexual double-entendres, and takedowns of sanctimonious celebrities. Now imagine that you still have a funny, completely engrossing comedy with enough arty gore to keep your 9-year-old focused on the screen while your grandma is hooting it up…