The Twenty-Second Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE TWENTY-SECOND NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Cemetery of Terror (1985), a Mexican zombie-slasher romp written and directed by Rubén Galindo Jr. 

Three narratives converge around a reanimated devil-worshiping serial killer named Devlon. First, we see the living Devlon gunned down after murdering a woman in an elevator. The psychiatrist from whom Devlon escaped demands that Devlon’s corpse be incinerated immediately, but a skeptical police captain refuses. Cut to the second narrative. Three jackass med students trick their dates into partying with them on Halloween night at an abandoned house next to a cemetery. Here, one of the students discovers a necromantic grimoire with “Devlon” written in blood on its cover. The students decide that the best way to keep the girls entertained is to steal a body from the morgue and read one of the grimoire’s incantations over it at the cemetery. The body they steal just so happens to be Devlon’s. Reading the incantation causes a flash storm to soak everyone, so they abandon the body and return to the house. The students’ ploy pays off because their dates all start making out with them. Unfortunately, the good times do not last. The incantation causes Devlon to reanimate, track the students down, and start efficiently slaughtering them one by one. Cut to the third narrative. This concerns the police captain’s young son and his group of friends journeying to the cemetery, where they are besieged by a horde of zombies under Devlon’s command. 

I chose Cemetery of Terror not because it’s well-regarded or even well-known but because I liked the poster. Luckily, my gamble paid off—this movie is very entertaining! The first half shall we say borrows piano riffs, stalker pov shots, and a whole kill sequence from Carpenter’s Halloween. But it hardly matters, since the mash-up of Halloween-clone slasher with demented Fulci-influenced zombie horror, by way of distinctly Mexican cinematic flourishes, makes Cemetery of Terror feel original throughout. Dropping the entire third-act cast of imperiled children in favor of more likeable and longer-lived med student characters would definitely have made for a more coherent script, but the result might also have felt less idiosyncratic. 

TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS:

This time our film provides us with an opportunity to compare the doppelgänger to that workhorse monster of 80’s and 2000’s creature cinema, the zombie. Both the doppelgänger and the zombie appropriate our bodies* and make them do things out of our control. The key difference is that for the zombie, control is exercised through an unintelligent set of instructions (which are sometimes commanded by a warlock like Devlon and sometimes dictated by the logic of a virus), such as “(1) seek brains; (2) if found, eat brains.” The body thereby becomes a simple meat robot. Whereas, for the doppelgänger, control is exercised directly by an intelligent mind; it’s just that that mind is alien. In both cases, what we fear is a loss of control over our own flesh. But whether in sleep, in sickness, or in death, this loss of control is something none of us can avoid.

*Note that while we commonly associate zombies with dead bodies, even our living bodies can become zombies if they are unconscious and controlled by something other than our wills. So, zombies are not necessarily distinguished from doppelgängers by vital status.