On VHS:
Glen (Dorff) is a young pre-adolescent kid living in the suburbs who has just been grounded by his parents, who are going out of town for the weekend. His fifteen-year-old elder sister Al (Denton) has been left in charge, but spends most of her time partying. So Glen and his best friend Terry (Tripp) have plenty of time to explore the hole that was left when a work crew pulled up an old tree in Glen's backyard. But there's more at the bottom of this hole than rocks and dirt; strange paranormal forces are beginning to make themselves felt in the form of levitation, frightening nightmares and hallucinations, etc. Glen and Terry discover what they believe to be a huge geode in the hole. But when they crack the round stone open, it releases a strange light, a gust of wind, and a sinister spiritual force which leaves a message in an alien language written on Glen's note board.
Terry listens to a metal band called Sacrifyx, and believes that their album The Dark Book explains what the hole in Glen's yard really is; a gateway to the infernal domain of the "Old Gods" which was long ago sealed up and forgotten. Lyrics from the album warn "...when all was darkness and chaos, the Old Gods, the forgotten gods, ruled the darkness...there is ...a Gate behind which the demons wait for the chance to take back what is theirs." The front of the album is illustrated with a picture of a creature with glowing eyes and long claws climbing up from a dark pit. The album cover for The Dark Book is itself a book, and opens up to reveal the pages of a grimoire inside. The pages are illustrated with drawings of monstrous creatures and quasi-magickal symbols - the keen-eyed viewer will notice that one of them is the Masonic seal. Terry explains to Glen that the band Sacrifyx came from Europe and used a real grimoire called The Dark Book, "the Bible for demons" as inspiration for their music. They only produced one album before they all died in a plane crash. "The lyrics in the album tell you how to summon the demons. Now there's this certain time when the constellations are aligned when you can open the Gate and let the Old Gods - those are the demons - come through. Well I checked and it's like now!" By playing the album backwards, Terry has discovered an incantation which he believes can banish the demons and seal the Gate.
Glen and Terry try the exorcism, but to no avail; the family dog Angus has died and Al's wannabe boyfriend has buried the body in the hole. The demons have accepted the body as the sacrifice requisite to their return and blast the Gate\hole wide open. Tiny malevolent demons invade Glen's house, infesting it like cockroaches. When Terry tries to use The Dark Book, it bursts into flames and reduces to ashes. The kids try using the Bible (first Psalms 59:1-2, then Genesis 1:1) on the Gate and even throw the family bible down the hole, where it explodes like a bomb, temporarily sealing the Gate\hole. But their deliverance is short-lived; as Terry warns "These guys are older than the Bible!"
An ominous black cyclone of spiritual foulness swirls up out of the Gate like a dark tornado. Again the kids are attacked by a swarm of tiny demons, but this time their leader also appears: The gigantic Demon Lord smashes up through the floor of the house to confront Glen on the upper level. (I wonder if this is where Gans got his idea for a similar scene in "The Drowned" from Necronomicon.) Similar to an illustration in The Dark Book, the Demon Lord's elongated, four-eyed head looks a bit like that of a shantak, but his multiple-armed and tentacled upper body more closely resembles a Hindu demon or the Ramasekva form of Yog-Sothoth. The worm-like lower body of the Demon Lord - rising out of the ground - is reminiscent of Brian Lumley's Cthonians. Whatever he is, the Demon Lord definitely looks as though he belongs in the pantheon of the Cthulhu Mythos. After Glen's hand is touched by the Demon Lord, it surrealistically sprouts an eye in the palm, which Glen bravely gouges out with a piece of broken glass. (There was a lot of horrible hand-jive going on back in 1987 - what with Bruce Campbell hacking off his own possessed paw with a chainsaw in Evil Dead II.)
According to Terry's record album/grimoire, these Old Gods can only be destroyed by the energy of "Pure love and light", so Glen launches a skyrocket his sister gave him loaded with fireworks into the Demon Lord's body and blasts him into puree-of-monster in the finest Ghostbusters tradition. In a slightly cheesy denouement, everybody survives, including Angus the family dog, who is now very much alive. The house, however, is hopelessly trashed.
The real stars of this relatively low-budget film are the special effects, which are pretty spectacular. The screenplay of the film seems to be heavily influenced by Brian Lumley's The Burrowers Beneath; a tale of subterranean Cthulhu Mythos creatures called Cthonians tunneling through the earth's crust and emerging into the surface world to spread havoc. Even the appearance of a big geode in the plot is reminiscent of the eggs of the Cthonians which appear to be huge, round geode-like stones. Lumley also mentions the Necronomicon in The Burrowers Beneath, but the book is in its original Lovecraftian form, not a record album/grimoire by a death metal band.
But the idea of a rock music Necronomicon is not as far from quotidian reality as it might seem: Swiss death metal band Celtic Frost once had plans to produce an album entitled Necronomicon, but dropped the idea for some unknown reason. Another death metal band, this one from Germany, named itself "Necronomicon". Both bands were active in the mid-eighties, when The Gate was filmed. Influence from both Lovecraft and modern Necronomicon forgeries on rock bands is a well-known phenomenon - as discussed in my essay "Magick and the Necronomicon". Who knows? Some day perhaps we'll see a rock opera version of the Necronomicon! After all, Herman Slater and Simon (author of the Simon Necronomicon) once collaborated on a rock opera version of Crowley's Book of the Law. Now I understand why Joe Bob Briggs once nominated the musical Chorus Line as best horror film of 1985.
On VHS:
1998 © John Wisdom Gonce III. All rights reserved.