Cult 101: Night of the Creeps (1986)
Director: Fred Dekker Run Time: 90 min. Rating: R Release Year: 1986
Starring: Jason Lively, Jill Whitlow, Steve Marshall, Tom Atkins, Wally Taylor
Country: United States
Language: English
Cult 101 at Gateway Film Center
A celebration of the best cult films of all time.
See more Cult 101About the film:
In this campy chiller, an alien experiment crashes to earth in 1959 and infects a college student. They freeze the body, but in the modern day, two geeks pledging a fraternity accidentally thaw the corpse, which proceeds to infect the campus with parasites that transform their hosts into killer zombies. Enter cranky and suicidal police detective Ray Cameron.
“a classic in every sense of the word”
—Steve Barton, Dread Central
A love letter to genre film, the story is full of nods to the audience, like the fact that most of the main characters (Romero, Carpenter, Raimi, Landis, Hooper, Cronenberg, Cameron, Steve Miner, Wes Craven, Mario Bava) are named after celebrated filmmakers. After its original release in only 70 theaters, the fun and gory Night of the Creeps (1986) became one of the most sought-after cult films of the 1980s.
About the filmmaker:
Fred Dekker is an American screenwriter and film director best known for his cult classic horror comedy films Night of the Creeps (1986) and The Monster Squad (1987), an homage to the Universal Monsters. He contributed the story ideas for House (1986) and Ricochet (1991), and directed and co-wrote RoboCop 3 (1993) with Frank Miller. Dekker also co-wrote The Predator (2018) with frequent collaborator Shane Black. Dekker’s work in television includes writing three episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise and five episodes of the Tales from the Crypt television series, directing the 1990 episode “The Thing From the Grave”. He attended the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television.
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