Last Updated on November 7, 2024

Do you like movies with zombies, parasitic aliens, spaceships, axe-wielding slashers, hard-boiled detectives, cryogenically frozen monsters, or college campus hijinks? Then you’d probably love the movie Fred Dekker made his directorial debut with, because it takes all of those elements and blends them together into one 90-minute thrill ride. The movie is the 1986 cult classic Night of the Creeps (watch it HERE), and it happens to be the best horror movie you never saw.

Fred Dekker earned his first screen credit by coming up with the story for the 1985 film House, which was directed by genre regular Steve Miner from a screenplay by Dekker’s college roommate Ethan Wiley. But beyond House, Dekker wasn’t having much luck getting projects off the ground. He wrote a time-travel epic called The Forever Factor that he said was rewritten to death and never made it into production. He and Miner developed an American Godzilla movie that ended up falling apart, and Dekker made an unsuccessful run at the chance to write the sequel to the horror sci-fi classic Alien, with the gig going to James Cameron instead. Having nothing to lose, he sent out his horror-comedy script Night of the Creeps with himself attached as a director, and TriStar Pictures actually took a chance on letting him make the movie.

Armed with a budget of $5 million, Dekker assembled a cast headed by Tom Atkins as the tough but traumatized Detective Ray Cameron, a role that cemented Atkins as a genre icon. When slug-like alien parasites start turning co-eds on the local college campus into mindless zombies, Cameron realizes that this zombie outbreak has something to do with the night back in 1959 when his ex-girlfriend was murdered by an axe-wielding mental patient. The connection is that while Cameron’s ex was being murdered by the maniac, her date that night discovered a canister that fell from the sky, like The Blob. But instead of a deadly ooze, this canister contained one of those alien parasites, which leapt into his mouth and took over his body. His alien-controlled body was then captured and put in cryostasis in a secret lab at Corman University, named after legendary producer Roger Corman, one of the many genre filmmakers who get name-checked in the movie.

Twenty-seven years later, college kids Chris, played by Jason Lively, and his best friend JC, played by Steve Marshall, accidentally let the walking corpse and the quickly multiplying space slugs out of their icy tube while pulling a prank meant to get them into a fraternity—a fraternity they wouldn’t really fit into, especially since the most prominent member is the douchey Brad, played by Mama’s Family’s Alan Kaiser. Chris was hoping to impress his crush, Jill Whitlow, as sorority girl Cynthia, who happens to be dating Brad when Chris falls for her at first sight. Now, Cameron, Chris, Cynthia, and JC must figure out how to eradicate the college’s alien slug infestation. Unfortunately for many people on campus, the infestation gets way out of hand and really messes up plans for a school dance.

The idea for Night of the Creeps began with Detective Cameron’s catchphrase, which he says several times in the movie. Dekker imagined a tough-guy character answering the phone with “Thrill me,” and then built the Cameron character around that moment. He had previously created the college students Chris and JC for a short film, with the Chris character being heavily based on himself, and decided to mix them into whatever story Cameron could be part of. He then crafted the story by cobbling together every B-movie cliché he could think of: nerds, co-eds, wisecracking detectives, corny bit characters, slimy monsters, zombies, scum from outer space, and, as he described it, “the equivalent of throwing a bunch of different genres into a hockey rink and having them beat each other over the head.”

He apparently considered calling the script Sorority Girls vs. the Zombies at one point but ended up going with Night of the Creeps. On the set of the movie, he would jokingly refer to his film as “the last B-movie,” telling Fangoria that viewers wouldn’t need to see any more B-movies after this one because it pays homage to all of them. He added that he was attempting to make a stupid low-budget horror movie that would hopefully have characters people care about when they die. At the time, he also claimed that he wrote the screenplay in just one week, but in an interview 20 years later, he said it took him two weeks, and recently he admitted that writing the first draft took closer to three weeks to complete.

Night of the Creeps was filmed around the University of Southern California campus and inside an abandoned Woolworth’s building. Since Dekker was backed up by a solid cast and decent budget, had Steve Miner shooting the second unit for him, and could rely on an FX crew led by David B. Miller, who had worked on The Terminator, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, and Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, among other projects, they made it through principal photography without running into major issues. Problems didn’t arise until post-production. Once Dekker and editor Michael Annu started cutting footage, they discovered that the movie had a serious pacing issue, which the director says the studio railroaded him on. Disagreements over the pacing got so serious that an executive shut Dekker out of the editing room and did their own pass on the film. Dekker then watched the executive’s cut and approved anything about the film he didn’t hate.

The studio gave Dekker a lot of grief about the pacing at the time, but when he recorded the audio commentary for a DVD and Blu-ray release of Night of the Creeps 20 years later, he voiced his own displeasure with the pacing of certain scenes and sequences still in the final cut. He learned his lesson about making sure moments are paced right, and from this experience on, he kept a stopwatch with him on set and asked the actors to speed things up if a scene was taking too long.

The film ran into more trouble during a test screening, which Dekker described as disastrous. Reactions convinced TriStar that four or five days of reshoots were necessary to enhance the climactic action sequences. Dekker gave Cameron more cool things to do in his battle against the space-slug zombies and, at the suggestion of a studio executive, added a scene in which Chris and Cynthia, already armed with a shotgun and flamethrower, seek shelter in a tool shed and use other implements against the undead, notably a lawnmower—a precursor to the lawnmower sequence in Peter Jackson’s zombie movie Dead Alive. One thing that couldn’t be salvaged was Dekker’s preferred ending: a scene featuring a spaceship hovering over a graveyard. The special effects weren’t finished for the test screening, so viewers were confused by it, and TriStar ordered it be replaced by a jump-scare ending with a zombie dog puppet, which Dekker wasn’t happy with.

That dog ending was in the theatrical cut, which ended up being the cut put on VHS and LaserDisc. The TV cut had the spaceship ending with finished effects, and when Night of the Creeps came to DVD and Blu-ray, Dekker made sure the movie had the TV cut ending. The ending he wanted all along.

The effort to get the movie into the best condition didn’t pay off in 1986. TriStar had so little faith in Night of the Creeps that they gave it a limited regional release, playing in only 70 theaters scattered across the United States. Some of those areas didn’t even have the proper title; in Cincinnati, for example, Night of the Creeps was released as Homecoming Night. Because of this botched release strategy, the movie didn’t find its audience until it was on home video and began airing on cable. Once genre fans got the chance to see it, it quickly gained a cult following and remains beloved to this day.

The box-office failure of Night of the Creeps didn’t bother Dekker much because he was already working on his second feature, The Monster Squad, another movie we’ve covered in the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw series. The director hated Night of the Creeps for years because he only saw its flaws. It took a long time for him to see the charm that won fans over. Both Night of the Creeps and The Monster Squad are considered classics today and have legions of fans, but Dekker says Creeps reflects his personal aesthetic more, as executive producer Peter Hyams had a major influence on how much of The Monster Squad was shot. Dekker was calling his own shots on Night of the Creeps but wasn’t fully responsible for the final cut or the theatrical ending.

You can tell from the opening moments that Night of the Creeps is going to be an awesome movie. It begins on a spaceship with a quick action scene featuring a trio of funny-looking aliens. Dekker didn’t intend for these aliens to get a laugh, but it’s hard not to chuckle at the sight of them, and the director quickly realized that was a good thing. These creatures, as the first things the audience sees, give them permission to go along with the film’s humor and continue laughing throughout the running time.

One of the aliens is under the control of the slugs, and the other two try to stop it from launching the canister that contains one of the parasites into space. The aliens aren’t able to keep the canister on their ship, despite firing their laser guns at their zombified pal. The film then jumps to a great black-and-white sequence set in 1959, with both the canister and an escaped mental patient ruining a couple’s romantic night out.

It will take a while for Night of the Creeps to reach this level of excitement again once the story moves ahead to 1986. So, it’s understandable when you hear that Dekker still has issues with the pacing, but the film has an entertaining tone and likable characters that carry you through to the next sequences of action and horror. Dekker was able to achieve his goal of making sure the audience would care about Chris, J.C., and Cynthia, and Tom Atkins really steals the show with his performance as the wisecracking Detective Cameron. Cameron has a dark secret and becomes unhinged and suicidal when the infestation of space slugs causes that secret to resurface – literally. But he doesn’t allow his dark mood to stop him from continuing to drop amusing lines or from putting his all into wiping out zombies.

The zombie dog puppet may be disappointing to the director, and the aliens were unexpectedly funny, but overall David B. Miller and his crew did an incredible job with the film’s special effects, which are still nice to see all these years later. Night of the Creeps also wins points due to the fact that the J.C. character is unable to walk without using crutches, but Dekker didn’t make a huge deal about this in the story. It is addressed, but it’s taken as a fact about the character. When asked why he had J.C. use crutches, Dekker replied, “There’s no reason, except that we just don’t see it. You can make a movie with a character who’s handicapped without the story being about the fact that he’s handicapped.”

The opening scenes are a highlight, but there’s more fun to come as Night of the Creeps goes along. There’s a suspenseful scene where J.C. has a run-in with the space slugs in a restroom, and one of the best moments comes when Cameron is faced with the axe-wielding rotten corpse of the homicidal mental patient he executed 27 years before, now under the control of the alien parasites.

Then we get the big action sequence at the end, with a horde of zombies attacking the sorority house while Cameron, Chris, and Cynthia gun them down and blast them with the flamethrower. The movie’s low budget does show through in how simple the action is; viewers probably expect the action to take up more time and be more elaborate in a modern movie. You can see why the reshoots and the addition of the tool shed scene were absolutely necessary because the climax would feel underwhelming without them. But thankfully, the studio realized this aspect of the film needed to be enhanced before they released it. What’s in the finished film works quite well and is a lot of fun to watch.

Dekker has described Night of the Creeps as a strange little movie, saying that’s part of its charm. He isn’t sure what a modern viewer would make of it if they were just seeing it for the first time now, but he does feel that the movie holds up. He told the Dark Lord Bunnykins website that it has a resonance because “there are very likable characters, and it’s really kind of a crazy story. And it’s tough to go wrong with those two things.” Horror fans who have a love for 1980s genre movies, old-school practical effects, and B-movie clichés are really likely to have a blast with Night of the Creeps, whether they watched it for the first time in 1986 or 2022. And if you really want to be assured that this is a quality horror comedy, you don’t have to take our word for it – trust genre icon Tom Atkins, who ranks Night of the Creeps as his personal favorite of all the movies he’s made. Coming from an actor who’s been in such films as The Fog, Escape from New York, Creepshow, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, Lethal Weapon, and Maniac Cop, among many others, it makes it clear that Night of the Creeps is something special.

Some previous episodes of the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw series, including the one on The Monster Squad, can be seen below. To see more, and to check out some of our other shows, head over to the JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!