DEMON LOVER DIARY: The Greatest Making-of Doc No One Has Ever Seen
A 1980 underseen classic may finally be returning.
In 1974 a couple of factory workers in Michigan decided they wanted to make a horror movie. Not really knowing how to go about making a film, they brought in a cameraman and his crew from the East Coast. The film they were making was called Demon Lover, and the document of their increasingly weird, tense and eventually sinister process is called Demon Lover Diary, and it might be the greatest making-of documentary of all time.
Yeah, it’s a pretty high bar to clear, with films like American Movie and Overnight having big spots in the imagination. But I think the movie Demon Lover Diary is in competition with is actually Hearts of Darkness, the story of the breakdown behind the scenes of Apocalypse Now. Superficially Demon Lover Diary is like American Movie - a couple of scrappy, heavily accented dorks from the Midwest have a Hollywood dream but perhaps not the Hollywood talent - but Demon Lover Diary is more like a found footage horror film, a slow descent into darkness that ends with the main characters in a place of real peril as the hapless Midwesterners become more dangerous and unhinged.
But before we go any further - the movie is funny! There’s a deep cinema verite wryness on display in Demon Lover Diary, an almost anthropological detachment from the weird world of 1970s swinging Midwesterners (wait until you meet the guy whose house has his wife on one floor and his girlfriend on another, with a second girlfriend moving in a couple of doors down). These guys are clowns and weirdos - one scene features one of the Demon Lover directors, a big guy with long permed hair and the world’s weirdest semi-Fu Manchu, doing his karate practice, a Danny McBride bit if I ever saw one - but there’s darkness hidden within them. That same silly, Cowardly Lion-esque guy (Jerry) reveals that he purposefully lost one of his fingers at his factory job so he could collect eight grand in insurance money to make the movie.
Demon Lover Diary is perfectly structured. Director Joel DeMott opens the film in her boyfriend Jeff Kreines’ cluttered, film dork apartment on the East Coast. It’s intimate - we see Jeff getting dressed, on the toilet - in a way that establishes these two as real people who are taking a gig that they hope will get them to the next level. As they drive out to Michigan things get dicey right away as one of the directors, Don, fires Jeff over the phone and hangs up on him. The stage is set for the rocky relationship to follow.
Joel, Jeff and their sound guy Mark end up staying with Don’s mom, a prim and proper old lady who can not know they’re making a movie about demons. They meet the rest of the crew and the cast, largely teenage girls that Don and Jerry seem to be dating or interested in. And they start making the movie only to quickly realize that no one else on this set has the slightest clue what they’re doing.
Again, it’s funny at first but what makes Demon Lover DIary so special is the way that DeMott manages to be such a perfect fly on the wall; her camera is seemingly running all the time and everybody on set kind of forgets that it’s even there, and so they’re absolutely and totally unaffected in front of it (except for Jerry, who seems to have a thing for being a jerk while looking right into the lens). It’s remarkable how well the doc captures the feeling of hanging around with people, working on a project that is slowly going nowhere, killing time and getting increasingly more annoyed.
It also captures 1974. There’s a modern view of the 70s as some kind of disco chic glamour era, but in reality it was a 1960s hangover in deep, deep earth tones. The hairdos on display in this movie are scarier than anything Jerry and Don could ever hope to put on film in their low budget horror flick, and the gendered attitudes are pretty wild. There is something pleasantly eternal about Jeff, though - he’s slovenly and balding and out of shape and would likely fit in nicely on Film Twitter these days. The film dork has always been the film dork.
It’s funny and it’s a wonderful time capsule until we get to the end. There’s a surprise celebrity cameo that I will not spoil, but it harkens a turn to true darkness and danger (in a way that, given the celebrity’s personal character, is not surprising!) that makes the final reels of this documentary play out like a horror film. And when I say a horror film, I mean there’s a scene where the camera is running and filming nothing and someone is sobbing in the background.
DeMott is not interested in the mechanics of the low budget filmmaking process, she is only interested in the humanity of it, and by focusing sharply on just the people and their increasingly tense interactions (as well as one surprisingly sweet and goofy romance), she makes a making-of doc that goes far beyond EPK material. She’s capturing something real at the center of American self-mythologizing, the kind of “confidence of the mediocre white man” we have heard so much about the last few years but that has been with us for centuries. And this is what I think makes a truly good filmmaking doc, the understanding that what is interesting is not the process but the weird amalgamation of people who are forced to come together to bring the thing to life. It’s why Hearts of Darkness is so great, because it’s about the madness that lies behind true artistic ambition, and Demon Lover Diary is about what happens when that madness is not countered by an equal amount of genius.
Demon Lover Diary is not available legally at the moment (I was able to see it with the gracious permission of Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines at a memorial service for the wonderful and dearly missed Doug Jones), but it is being restored as we speak with plans for a release later this year or next. That’s a story that has been told a number of times over the decades, so we’ll see what happens. I do hope the movie becomes more widely available, because it is only its absence from video stores and streaming that has kept Demon Lover Diary from attaining its place as one of the most defining films about the fucked up and human aspects of filmmaking.