“God is dead, the teens are doomed, and the monsters are Ray Harryhausen’s evil cousins. Welcome to the weird, wonderful madness of Equinox.”*
There’s a peculiar joy to watching a movie that shouldn’t work—but somehow absolutely does. Equinox, a supernatural horror curio stitched together from a student short and expanded with duct tape, demon sweat, and at least one good book of the damned, is one of those low-budget miracles. It’s part Scooby-Doo, part Lovecraft, and part monster kid fever dream. It’s Evil Dead before Evil Dead, but with even less budget and slightly more theological confusion.
Made for just $8,000 (which is less than the catering budget on most straight-to-streaming thrillers about killer AI), Equinox is a 1970 film that dares to ask: “What if Satan gave four college kids a book and the power of terrible decisions?” The answer is an 82-minute descent into madness, demons, and the kind of acting that makes community theater look like the Royal Shakespeare Company.
And yet… it’s kind of brilliant.
Let’s dive in—crosses in hand.
A Psychiatrist, a Flashback, and a Whole Lot of WTF
The film opens with a framing device straight out of a cheap Poe adaptation: a journalist interviews a catatonic man, David Fielding (Edward Connell, whose performance exists entirely in wide-eyed panic and exaggerated gestures). He’s locked up in a psychiatric hospital after the deaths of his three friends—Susan, Jim, and Vicki—during what was supposed to be a nice, normal canyon picnic.
Instead of sandwiches and sun, they get a cursed Necronomicon knockoff, monsters, a demon in a park ranger hat, and what looks like Satan’s attempt at a public access horror show.
It’s like Stand by Me if the train was replaced with a winged hell-beast and one of the kids ate the others.
From Beach Party to Book of the Damned
The gang’s trouble starts when they go looking for Professor Watermann, a scientist who apparently skipped town after discovering evil in paperback form. Instead of the good professor, they find an old man who smells like sulfur and hands them a book that literally contains the Lord’s Prayer… backwards. Which, if you’ve ever taken theology from a Satanic puppet, you know is a big red flag.
Soon enough, everyone is either dead, possessed, or dealing with monsters that look like Harryhausen’s half-drunk rejects: we get a horned devil, a green giant with serious skin conditions, a hairy brute that probably rents space in Rodan’s spare bedroom, and Asmodeus himself, the demon disguised as a park ranger with a mustache that screams “I give out speeding tickets and eternal torment.”
Stop-Motion Sanity and the Craft of Cheap Brilliance
Here’s the thing: Equinox isn’t good in any traditional sense. The acting is often wooden, the dialogue sounds like it was written during a fever dream, and the transitions are about as smooth as a gravel slip-n-slide. But the movie has soul. Glorious, hand-crafted, monster-worshipping soul.
The stop-motion effects—courtesy of Dave Allen and Jim Danforth—are the real stars here. You don’t watch Equinox for character development; you watch it to see a rubbery beast slam a tombstone into the ground like it’s auditioning for WWE Apocalypse. You watch it because every monster scene feels like a teenager’s sketchbook has come to life with glue, sweat, and a lot of heart.
When that red-winged devil flaps across the screen, you don’t laugh at the film. You grin because it’s doing everything it can to entertain you, on a budget usually reserved for pizza delivery.
Possession, Confusion, and Existential Horror—Teen Edition
Barbara Hewitt as Susan brings a sort of doomed sweetness to her role, right before becoming a vessel of ancient evil and screaming her way through several exorcism-lite moments. She’s the kind of girl who probably just wanted to be prom queen but wound up a demon bride because she forgot her cross at the worst possible moment.
Frank Bonner (of WKRP in Cincinnati fame!) plays Jim, the kind of sidekick who dies nobly, mostly because the movie needed a few corpses by the second act. Robin Christopher’s Vicki isn’t given much to do besides scream and serve as Asmodeus’s chew toy. The only people who make it out with their dignity intact are the monsters—and even they get blown up by a magical cross.
The best part? After all the death and brimstone, the film ends with David in a psych ward, and Susan returning as a reanimated corpse to finish the job. It’s bleak. It’s weird. And it makes zero theological sense.
Equinox doesn’t end. It lingers. Like the smell of sulfur on an old paperback.
The Cult, the Criterion, and the Cred
Somehow—through sheer force of nerd love and monster-fueled nostalgia—Equinox became a cult classic. It gained traction on late-night television and drive-in screens where plot coherence is optional and style trumps sense. In 2006, the Criterion Collection released it on DVD. Yes, the same Criterion that champions Bergman and Kurosawa also said: “This stop-motion demon deserves archiving.”
It’s praised by George Lucas, who probably saw it and thought, “You know what this needs? A lightsaber and a Jawa.” Ray Harryhausen respected it. And monster fans continue to watch it today not because it’s flawless, but because it’s fearless.
And it’s hard not to admire a movie that throws everything at the wall—tentacles, demons, puppets, Catholic symbolism, spontaneous possession—and somehow makes it stick, even if only with supernatural glue and amateur charm.
Final Thoughts: The Lord’s Prayer… in Reverse
Equinox is the cinematic equivalent of finding a demonic tome at a garage sale and reading it out loud just to see what happens. It’s messy, goofy, terrifying in spots, and inexplicably charming. For every frame that makes you groan, there’s another that makes you sit up and mutter, “Wait, did that demon just rip a guy in half?”
Final Rating: 3.75 out of 5 Flapping Demonic Wings
It’s not a good movie—it’s a great bad one. It’s a scrapbook of terror, an awkward dance with darkness, and a love letter to monsters from a bunch of passionate weirdos with a camera and a dream.
Grab a cursed book, forget your crucifix, and cue the stop-motion—this one’s worth the ritual.
