A few however remembered when Horror Films were both scary and fun, and sought to recapture that for modern audiences. Fred Dekker was one of these, and in two films in the 1980s, he managed to accomplish it better than most. Though better known for the second of those movies, 1987’s The Monster Squad, which harkened back to the great Universal Monster pictures of the 1930s and ‘40s, it was his 1986 tribute to the Sci-Fi horrors of the 1950s, Night of the Creeps, which put him on the map.

    The film opens aboard an alien spacecraft. Two of the crew are chasing a third, who seems intent on escape with some sort of container. He shoots it into space before they can apprehend him, and it lands on Earth - in 1959. Two teenagers on a date see it, mistaking it for a shooting star. It hits the ground close by, and they decide to investigate. They get as close as they can by car, then the boy continues on foot. As he disappears into the woods, the girl hears a radio newscast concerning an escaped mental patient in the area - one who’s murdered four of the attendants with an axe.

    The boy finds the impact site, but what is inside the crater is no meteorite. It’s obviously artificial, and through a transparent window in the side he can see something moving - or more precisely, squirming. Back at the car, the girl begins calling to him, begging him to come back so they can get out of there. Unseen by her, emerging from the woods behind the car, is a figure - a figure in a hospital gown, carrying an axe.

    The scene shifts to 1986. It’s pledge week on the campus of Corman University, but Chris Romero (Jason Lively, and yes, he’s Blake’s brother) finds it hard to care about such frivolity. The freshman is still pining for his high-school sweetheart, who had recently dumped him. His best friend, J. C. - "James Carpenter" - Hooper (Steve Marshall), tries to lift his spirits, but Chris is determined to remain in his melancholy state - that is, until he notices a beautiful young woman in a group in front of a sorority house. J. C. urges him to go over and introduce himself, but Chris is too shy for that. J. C., however, is not. The young man, who walks with the aid of crutches due to a disability, approaches her and asks her name. He explains that it’s for his friend. She demurs at first, but soon relents. Her name is Cynthia Cronenberg (Jill Whitlow), and she has a boyfriend, a preppy jock named Brad (Allan J. Kayser), who takes an instant dislike to our young heroes.

    The boys want to pledge Brad’s fraternity, partly to get to know Cynthia better. Chris hopes to impress her with a fraternity membership. Brad has no intention of allowing them to pledge the frat however, and sets an impossible challenge for them to accomplish - steal a cadaver from the University’s Medical School, and leave it on the door step of a rival house. Chris and J. C., undeterred by the challenge, head off to snatch the price of their admission.

    As they explore the basement of the medical school, they find a room full of computer equipment, and at the end of the room stands a large cylinder containing what appears to be a frozen corpse. It is the body of the teenager who originally found the alien container back in 1959. The body is in cryogenic storage, obviously kept there for twenty-seven years. J. C. accidentally shuts down the unit, opening the cylinder. The boys decide to make the most of the situation and take this corpse. However, as Chris starts to carry it off, its hand reaches out, latching on to J. C.’s arm. Chris drops the body and run from the lab, just as the technician returns.

    The boys rush back to their dorm room, where they proceed to have an expository argument, which fills in some of the holes in regards to their friendship. In another part of town, Det. Ray Cameron is dreaming - dreaming of being on a tropical beach, lovely waitresses bringing him drinks in coconut shells, while bikinied beauties stroll the beach. In the distance, a figure in a formal gown rises from the water. It is the girl that fell victim to the axe murderer nearly thirty years ago—the girl that Ray had once been in love with, until she dumped him.

    The dream changes. Ray’s in a patrolman’s uniform. It’s the night, and scene of, his former girlfriend’s murder. The maniac stands at the side of the car, repeatedly swinging the axe down on the occupant. Ray aims his shotgun at the murderer’s back, and the killer turns to face the cop - revealing the rotted, desiccated face of a corpse. Ray awakes with a start, just as the phone rings. He answers it with his trademark,  'Thrill me." There’s trouble at the University.

    When Ray arrives at the lab, he finds several uniformed officers and a detective already on scene. The coroner is preparing to remove the body of the lab technician, and Ray is confused. The report he had noted two bodies in the lab, where was the second one?

    The sergeant in charge of the scene reluctantly admits that the two rookies who were first to respond had both been out of the room at the same time; when they came back, the second body was gone. Ray remarks that a dead body doesn’t just get up and walk away; however, that’s exactly what it’s doing at that very moment, as it shuffles towards the sorority house where Cynthia lives. She’s in her room undressing, and hears a noise at her window. As she’s looking outside for the source of the noise, a face appears at her window - a face belonging to the body from the lab. As she screams in terror, the corpse’s head splits open spilling dozens of black, slug-like creatures onto the ground. They scamper off in a dozen different directions as the body collapses to the porch.

    Arriving at the sorority house, Ray is shocked to discover that the body has a gaping wound in its forehead—such as one might see with a blow from an axe. Memories of the girl’s death, never far from the surface, come rushing back. The next morning, the “Bradster” and his frat-pack are irate, and on the lookout for Chris and J. C. Instead of a rival fraternity, the corpse wound up on the doorstep of their sister sorority - and the brothers are not amused. The boys swear they had nothing to do with it; they had chickened out before they got the body out of the building. Brad lashes out as they walk away, kicking J. C.’s crutches out from under him.

    This is the last straw for Cynthia. Already tiring of Brad’s antics, his cruel tripping of a handicapped boy is too much, and she breaks up with him, leaving with Chris and J. C. Or rather, starting to; a police Detective named Landis has heard enough to make him curious about the pair’s nocturnal activities. He takes the boys in for questioning.

    At the station, Ray sits down with the boys, as well as the janitor from the building that houses the lab. Ray tells them he knows they were there. He even admits that it’s probably just a harmless prank gone wrong. The janitor saw them running from the lab, "screaming like banshees." J. C. goes with his instincts, saying they were nowhere near that lab. They aren’t the kind to indulge in pledge pranks; they aren’t even fraternity material. Chris interrupts his friend, however, by confessing that they were there. They did take the body out of cold storage, but it started twitching, they panicked, and ran out of there, as noted, "screaming like banshees," unencumbered by any corpses. The janitor’s report does seem to leave them in the clear, but Ray is going to keep an eye on them.

    That night, as the boys sit in their dorm room studying, Cynthia knocks at the door. She needs to discuss what she saw the night before, and she thinks they’re the only ones who might believe her. As they walk her back to her sorority, she tells them about the face at the window, and the creatures that erupted from its head. J. C. laughs at her description of the "zombie’s" visit, but Chris, already in love with the girl, is trying hard to be sympathetic. J. C. makes an excuse to leave them alone, and heads back to the dorm. Chris takes her to her door, and as she’s wishing him good night, she asks him to the formal dance the next night. He’s worried about Brad, but Cynthia reassures him that she’s done with him. Chris is ecstatic as he leaves the house; so much so that he nearly runs head first into Ray, who’s been watching and listening from the shadows. "Zombies… exploding heads… creepy crawlies… and a date for the formal. This is classic, Spanky."

    Back at the dorm building, J. C.’s in a stall in the restroom. He hears a noise outside the stall, and cracks open the door to peek out. The body of the janitor, infected when he encountered the reanimated corpse of the lab technician, is lying on the floor, head burst open, and a small swarm of the “creeps” slithering out of the gore. He destroys one with a burning matchbook, but falls trying to leave the stall—as one of the creeps heads straight for his open mouth.

    As this takes place, Chris has accompanied Ray back to his house. Ray pours them both a drink; they’ll need it. He asks the boy if he had a high school sweetheart. Chris tells him yes. The detective asks, "What happened?"  "She decided we didn’t ever need to talk to each other again, and went on with her life" is the younger man’s response.

    The older man explains that he too once had a girlfriend, one who, “… decided we didn’t ever need to talk to each other again.” However, while Chris’ former girlfriend happily went on with her life, Ray’s girl was hacked to pieces by a nutcase. By this point, Ray is talking more to himself than to Chris, a fact of which Chris is soon acutely aware. The detective describes how he hunted the lunatic down, off-duty, on his own. How, when he caught up with him, he leveled his shotgun at the man’s chest. "You know what I did next, Spanky," he asks Chris.

    "Should you be telling me this?" Chris wonders aloud. "Close," is the reply. He tells Chris, in detail, how he cold-bloodedly shot the killer down, burying his body in a vacant lot behind Cynthia’s sorority. Of course, that lot’s no longer vacant; it’s now the site of the house-mother’s cottage. Chris, conscious of the fact that the man sitting across the coffee-table from him has quite possibly lost his mind, asks, "… other than just wanting to confess to a murder, is there a point to this?"

    There is, of course, a point to this, and Dekker has done a superb job of making that point. Night of the Creeps blends many of the traditional aspects of the 1950s Science-Fiction genre with a post-Alien aesthetic, along with a touch of Night of the Living Dead thrown in for good measure. Virtually every important character is named in homage to a famous horror filmmaker, from Chris “Romero” to Sgt. "Raimi." As to the plot of the film, it can best be described as "Plan 10 from Outer Space," like Ed Wood’s infamous classic Plan 9 from Outer Space, only this time it has been perfected.

    Dekker didn’t have an easy time filming this project, however. This was his first feature as director, and there were times he felt overwhelmed, as he candidly discusses in the commentary for the 2009 DVD release of the movie. However, there were also times when his direction was inspired, such as the above scene between Atkins and Lively, or the 360º rotating shot of Atkins blasting away at zombies in the sorority house. Still, the film does have issues that illustrate Dekker’s inexperience. Pacing is a continuing problem, with sections of the movie that drag out, though not as much as Dekker seems to believe from his commentary.

    Part of his dissatisfaction with the finished product has much to do with decisions forced on him by the studio. The initial test screening did very poorly, convincing the executives that more action was needed. They took the rare step of giving Dekker more time and money to shoot an additional sequence, the fight in the tool shed. They also disapproved of the ending, which Dekker had screened for them before it was completed - before the optical effects had been added. Studio executives are known for many things. Imagination is not one of them. They wanted a new ending shot as well, one that would leave the audience with a final scare. Dekker came up with something that the studio liked, but which the fans felt was a cheat.

    Once completed, Tri-Star put together a lackluster campaign for the film. As producer Charles Gordon explains, the promotional effort was weak from the beginning. The first one-sheet poster approved by the studio was an image of a zombie’s hand reaching through a broken windowpane to unlock a door. A nice looking poster, but it bore little resemblance to the movie. As Gordon tried to explain to the executives at Tri-Star, the poster was very, very close in appearance to the one-sheet for the film House (ironically, scripted in part by Dekker). Both Gordon and Dekker were concerned that people would confuse the two films, or think that Night of the Creeps was a sequel to House. The studio, however, was happy with their poster, and ignored their concerns.

    Gordon’s misgivings about the campaign proved well-founded, however. Tri-Star decided to release the movie regionally, rather than nationwide, and the lack of a promotional campaign doomed it from the start, despite strong reviews. It even drew a favorable nod from the staid New York Times. Reviewing the movie, Times critic Nina Darnton notes that, “… beyond its obviously derivative inspiration, the film shows a fair ability to create suspense, build tension and achieve respectable performances.” That is rare high praise for a Horror Film from the Times.