One Dark Night

One Dark Night (1982)

A night to remember - until the day you die!

A strange man named Karl Rhamarevich dies shortly after discovering a way to become even more powerful in death through telekinesis. On the night of his burial in a crypt, Julie is to spend the night there as part of an initiation rite, supervised by two other girls. The crypt becomes a scene of horror as Raymar returns to life and deploys his horrifying telekinetic powers.

Date of release
1982-12-31
TMDB
5.4 / 10 (122)
Runtime
1h 34m
Genres
Horror
Director
Tom McLoughlin

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Los Angeles

One Dark Night is a 1982 American supernatural horror film directed by Tom McLoughlin, and starring Meg Tilly, E. G. Daily, and Adam West. It follows three teenagers sent to a mausoleum for the night as part of a high school initiation rite. A telekinetic occultist returns from the dead and haunts them, forcing the three to survive the night inside the crypt.

Production

Before becoming a director, Tom McLoughlin was a struggling scriptwriter and also starred in several minor roles in film including playing the monster in John Frankenheimer's 1979 horror film Prophecy. He worked with director Woody Allen in his 1973 film Sleeper. Not having much success with selling several comedy screenplays, McLoughlin and his friend Michael Hawes decided to make a gothic horror film similar to the works of Edgar Allan Poe.

The script was initially developed under the title Night in the Crypt. McLoughlin and Hawes also came up with the idea of a group of people being trapped inside a mausoleum with a "psychic vampire" that fed on the life energy of the other members of the group.

When searching for a lead actress to play the role of the film's heroine director McLoughlin had a specific vision for the film's heroine, "I wanted the classic beautiful blond geek girl who had a sense of innocence about her, and she was the one who was going to be tormented," he later recalled.

Filming took place in Los Angeles over a period of 28 days both on sets and on location with a budget of $800,000. The film's impressive special effects for the corpses used in the film were designed by Tom Burman along with several other artists. On filming in the actual mausoleum McLoughlin recalled, "In all those mausoleum scenes, Meg really got freaked out.

During the film's post-production the film was taken out of McLoughlin's hands and re-cut with the original ending removed. As McLoughlin recalled, "There was a version of the movie that wasn't shown in theaters, where there was this passing of Ramar's energies to the Meg Tilly character... In our version, she turns and we actually used Nastassia Kinski's eyes from Cat People.

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