ABCs of Horror 2: “N” Is for Night of the Creeps (1986)

Paste’s ABCs of Horror 2 is a 26-day project that highlights some of our favorite horror films from each letter of the alphabet. The only criteria: The films chosen can’t have been used in our previous Century of Terror, a 100-day project to choose the best horror film of every year from 1920-2019, nor previous ABCs of Horror entries. With many heavy hitters out of the way, which movies will we choose?
Some horror films possess a strain of what might be best described as embarrassment or self-loathing for their more puerile elements; a sheepishness against the perception of horror cinema as tacky garbage, inserted willingly or unknowingly by a filmmaker who perhaps believes he’s better than the material he’s working with. It’s an apologetic sort of quality, which seems to say “I’ll stoop to this level if it’s what you want to see, but I’ll take no ownership of this silliness.”
And then there’s something like Night of the Creeps, which is the polar opposite. Fred Dekker’s 1986 zombie flick—although calling it a “zombie movie” is really only scratching the zany surface—is stuffed to the gills with absurd material that is utterly unnecessary for the story it’s trying to tell, seemingly included only because the director seemed to find it personally amusing. Even in the midst of a campy decade in horror cinema—especially in the back half of the 1980s—Night of the Creeps still stands out for its utter devotion to madcap absurdity and gross-out thrills. It feels like the product of a deranged cocaine bender of a writing session, where not a single idea was shouted down, rejected or refined in any way. Instead, somehow it all made it up there on screen, and the result has “cult classic” written all over it.
All of this is made gloriously and bizarrely apparent by the film’s opening moments, which drop us with no context whatsoever into the steam-spouting corridors of an alien spacecraft, in which a squad of nude, pint-sized aliens who look like mutated Pillsbury Dough-Men are engaged in a firefight with one of their own, who jettisons a tube of hazardous material toward Earth. The film never returns to these aliens again, simply using the sequence to immediately wake up its audience and set events in motion. Could this information have been conveyed just as easily by simply showing a falling object enter Earth’s atmosphere? Sure, but then how would the Dough-Men costumes, with their exposed buttcracks, have gotten their moment to shine? Night of the Creeps is defined by these moments—any time there was an opportunity to make the movie more memorably weird, Dekker jumps all over it.