Hell Night-1981
Starring Linda Blair, Peter Barton, Vincent Van Patten
Director Tom DeSimone
Scott’s Review #1,476
Reviewed April 6, 2025
Grade: B
Hell Night (1981) is a slasher/horror film that provides fun late-night entertainment. A creepy deserted estate where a mass murder event happened amid a night of fraternity hazing offers the appropriate setting for a night of horror.
When four college pledges led by Marti (Linda Blair) are tasked with staying overnight after a costume party as a test of loyalty, what could go wrong?
Director Tom DeSimone knows what ingredients to pepper his film with for the most compelling and effectual result, essentially borrowing from other films. A dark overnight, attempted pranks, ghosts, screams, good-looking young people, and lots of booze and drug paraphernalia.
He incorporates the standard slasher backstory of a years-old event and a vicious killer still on the loose. This gimmick resembles Friday the 13th (1980) or Halloween (1978).
Folklore tells us that Garth Manor is an abandoned mansion once owned by Raymond Garth, who murdered his wife and three deformed children, Morris, Margaret, and Suzanne.
Garth then hanged himself. While he had a fourth deformed child, Andrew, his body was never found, nor was the body of Morris.
Folklore states that Morris and Andrew still lurk within the mansion, hungrily waiting for prey.
This immediately makes the pledges frightened and happy to get through the six-hour overnight alive. It also builds interest for the audience.
What makes Hell Night particularly unique is its subplot involving social classes. Marti is an intelligent girl from a blue-collar/working-class family who is obviously in university because of a scholarship. At the same time, her love interest, Jeff (Peter Barton), comes from an affluent family.
This makes the audience invest in these characters as they bond with each other. We root for them to find some romance before they are potentially chopped to bits by a maniac.
The other central characters are Denise (Suki Goodwin), a promiscuous party girl from England, and Seth (Vincent Van Patten), a surfer from Southern California. These characters are the film’s comic relief and, indeed, the ones that will ‘get it’.
Van Patten is nice to look at as he frequently parades shirtless while Denise often forgets his name.
Other stock characters are Peter, May, and Scott, who are responsible for ensuring the pledges don’t escape from the manor and scaring the wits out of them.
Naturally, the fun for the audience is the knowledge that most of the characters will be unceremoniously offed one by one, except for Marti, the film’s hero.
With pleasure, there is a decapitation, a body strung up on the roof, and a horrid scene where a character is hurled out the window.
Reminiscent of Black Christmas (1974), a film that heavily influenced 1980s slasher films, the police are ineffectual and dizzy, believing the pledges’ pleas for help are only part of a fraternity prank and nothing to investigate.
A macabre and terrific scene in which one of the pledges is arranged at a dining room table with the decaying corpses of the Garth family reminds me of Happy Birthday to Me (1981) or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).
Blair is effective as the ‘final girl’ because she’s smart, sensible, and relatable. With a girl-next-door veneer, she is easy to root for to conquer the fiendish killer (s).
I wanted more explanation about the motivations of the killers. Yes, they were assumed to be abused and mistreated, but why kill helpless college kids? I guess they’d kill anyone who entered the estate, but how would they survive and get food?
There’s also no nudity (male or female) or excessive blood, which gives a softer, tamer feel.
Borrowing heavily from other genre films, Hell Night (1981) is a worthy entry in the slasher genre, mostly because it incorporates an intelligent ‘final girl’ and a bit about social class.
