Hell Night

Hell Night (1981)

Scream and you're dead!

As an initiation rite into Alpha Sigma Rho fraternity, four pledges must spend a night in Garth Manor, twelve years to the day after the previous resident murdered his entire family.

Date of release
1981-08-28
TMDB
5.5 / 10 (204)
Runtime
1h 41m
Genres
Horror, Thriller
Director
Tom DeSimone

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Box office: $2.3M
  • Budget: $1.4M
  • Earned 1.6× its budget
  • Filmed in: California
  • Awards: 1 · Nominations: 1. Including: Sitges Film Festival best special effects award

Hell Night is a 1981 American supernatural slasher film directed by Tom DeSimone, and starring Linda Blair, Vincent Van Patten, Kevin Brophy, and Peter Barton. The film depicts a night of fraternity hazing set in an old manor—the site of a familial mass murder—during which a deformed killer terrorizes and murders many of the college students. The plot blends elements of slasher films and Gothic haunted house films. Filmmaker Chuck Russell served as an executive producer, while his long-time collaborator Frank Darabont served as a production assistant.

Production

Randy Feldman, then a recent graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, wrote the screenplay for Hell Night over an approximate five-week period. Feldman was loosely inspired by the plot of Black Christmas (1974), which centers on a killer preying on sorority sisters in their sorority house.

Feldman shopped the spec script to several film studios, among them Irwin Yablans's Compass International Pictures, who had distributed John Carpenter's Halloween (1978). Producer Bruce Cohn Curtis, a colleague of Yablans, subsequently contacted Feldman and expressed interest in purchasing the film rights. Mark L. Lester had also read the screenplay, but passed on directing the project.

Feldman's screenplay was slightly altered after it was purchased by Curtis, mainly in its implementation of an additional villain; the original draft had only featured one of the Garth brothers as a killer instead of two. Chuck Russell, who would later direct A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), served as executive producer on the film.

Actress Linda Blair was the first to become attached to the project through her working relationship with producer Curtis, who had produced several of her previous films, including Born Innocent (1974) and Roller Boogie (1979). The film marked her first horror film in several years, following The Exorcist (1973) and Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977).

Johanna Ray served as the film's casting director, and it was her first feature film credit. Curtis sought Peter Barton for the role of Jeff. Barton, a model, was hesitant to take the role and was considering abandoning his acting career at the time, but Curtis convinced him to star in the film. Vincent Van Patten was subsequently cast as Seth Davies, while Suki Goodwin, an English actress, was cast in the role of Denise Dunsmore.

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