"We Summon the Darkness" Review
Inside of the TCL Chinese Theatre, which hosted a night of the Screamfest film screening (photo courtesy of Creative Commons)
Satanic cults, sadistic killers, and a nostalgic mention of the heavy metal rock band Slayer summed up Screamfest’s last film screening on Oct. 17 at the TCL Chinese Theatre located in Hollywood.
Established in 2001 by film producers Rachel Belofsky and Ross Martin, Screamfest celebrated its 19th anniversary by serving horror film buffs a slice of underrated film directors' twisted minds.
The film festival’s closing night attracted horror enthusiasts from across Los Angeles, who filled the theatre’s auditorium to have one last taste of bountiful terror presented by “We Summon the Darkness,” a thriller/horror film directed by Marc Meyers and written by Alan Trezza.
“It’s sort of comforting to know that I’m not the only demented person here,” Trezza joked.
The film’s premise stars three best friends Alexis, Bev, and Val, who are en route to attend a heavy metal rock festival in 1988. The mischievous youths meet three fellow band members at the festival who later clash together for a night of debauchery and mishaps.
What’s supposed to be a night of good, yet hardly innocent, fun turns out to be a night filled with bestial acts and cold-blooded kills.
“We Summon the Darkness” dates back to an infamous era known as the “Satanic Panic” in the late 1980s, where a widespread series of moral panics concerning Satanic ritual abuse spread across the United States.
Trezza was inspired to write about this time period and it “being a hoax,” according to the writer, after he reminisced a moment in his life when he was in a heavy metal band in the late 80’s.
“I just remember having a lot of like, really aggravated conversations with people who thought me and my friends worshipped the devil because we listened to Slayer,” Trezza shared during a Q&A session held after the screening.
The association between Satanism and heavy metal rock bands reached its climax after police made several arrests were made on teens who claimed to commit brutal acts because "the devil made them do it."
One infamous case was Ricky Kasso who murdered his high school classmate, Gary Lauwers, in 1984. After luring Lauwers into the woods, Kasso claimed that a crow’s caw was Satan’s way of telling him to kill the victim.
Coincidentally, Kasso wore an AC/DC rock band t-shirt during his arrest. It didn’t take long for America to correlate the barbaric acts of violence with heavy metal music.
“The irony being that it wasn’t our landscape poisoned by the music ... it was their landscape poisoned by religious rights,” said Trezzo. “I started to see a lot of unfortunate parallels to what’s going on in today’s society where we tend to judge people because of how they look and not exactly how they are as human beings.”
Trezzo’s own personal experiences and beliefs is what inspired the writing portion of “We Summon the Darkness,” which will be released next year.
“Don’t write a movie that is particularly going to sell for a lot of money but, just write something you want to see," advised Trezzo to prospective filmmakers at the Q&A session.