The New Jersey Horror Con and Film Festival took over the Renaissance Woodbridge Hotel in Iselin, NJ this weekend for three days of scary movies, celebrities, cosplay, and more. While much of the fun was held in the convention and ballrooms downstairs, two viewing rooms were set up on the second floor for special screenings, as well as for film festival entrants. I took time to catch a block of short films, as well as a screening of a horror film that had been on my radar for a long time.

More below.

Night of the Demons
Blu-ray + DVD Combo
Director: Kevin S. Tenney
Screenwriter: Joe Augustyn
Cast: William Gallo, Hal Havins, Amelia Kinkade, Cathy Podewell, Linnea Quigley
Scream Factory
Rated R | 90 Minutes
Release Date: February 4, 2013

“Let’s party.”

Directed by Kevin S. Tenney (Witchboard), Night of the Demons is an “˜80s splatter-fest and the bastard spawn of horror flicks like The Evil Dead, Return of the Living Dead, and Mario Bava’s Demons.

It’s Halloween night and Angela (Amelia Kinkade) and her friend Suzanne (Linnea Quigley) are throwing a party. The girls have decided to celebrate All Hallows’ Eve at Hull House, a condemned funeral home and the former site of a grisly mass murderer.

Joining them are Goody Two–shoes Judy Cassidy (Cathy Podewell), her boyfriend Jay (Lance Fenton), Sal (William Gallo), Frannie and Max (Jill Terashita and Philip Tanzini), and the trio of Helen (Allison Barron), Rodger (Alvin Alexis), and the pig-nosed, mullet-sportin’ Stooge (Hal Havins).

Night Of The Demons
Blu-ray | DVD
Directed by Adam Gierasch
Starring Edward Furlong, Shannon Elizabeth, Monica Keena, John F. Beach, Diora Baird, Michael Copon
Entertainment One
Release date: October 19, 2010

While today’s horror filmmakers are either curbing the curse words for PG-13 teen-friendly flicks or increasing the realism for torture porn, Adam Gierasch brings us a fun, but spooky tale perfect for Halloween with his remake Night Of The Demons. This remake invokes the spirit of its predecessor — the 1988 Kevin Tenney film of the same name — by employing lots of blood and gore created mostly through practical effects. The two tales are similar in that party-goers unwittingly unleash a horde of demons on Halloween night, but the original film takes place in a mortuary where a séance releases the demons. Gierasch’s version brings the Halloween party to modern-day New Orleans to a mansion with a mysterious past.

It’s Halloween night and Angela Feld (Shannon Elizabeth) is planning the biggest party in town at the Broussard Mansion, a long-unoccupied New Orleans manse whose previous occupants went missing 85 years prior on the same night its owner, Evangeline Broussard, killed herself by hanging. In an effort to make some cash, Angela lures the paying party-goers to the mansion using its spooky history as bait.