Shannon vs. THE GATE

New intern and our Unseelie Sidhe Queen, Shannon, takes on a retro ride back to the Eighties and “The Gate to Suburban Hell.”

Yes, I was a free range kid in the ‘80’s. I rode my bike all over the neighborhood, used sticks for sword-fights, and ran away from unchained dogs.

Unlike the kids in the 1987 film The Gate though, I never tried opening a gate to hell. My family was deeply concerned about the Satanic panic of the ‘80’s so summoning demons in the backyard was not something that would have gone over well or unnoticed.

Directed by Tibor Takacs, The Gate features Glen (a young, baby-faced Stephen Dorff in his first film role), an average kid living in the suburbs. He has a jacket full of space exploration patches that would make any NASA nerd proud. His best friend Terry (Louis Tripp) is a metal head in training. When a construction crew removes a tree from Glen’s backyard, a smoking hole is uncovered.

Of course, as ‘80’s kids do, they start screwing around with the hole. Then strange things begin to happen around Glen’s house.

This movie exists in during that time period where parents can go away for the weekend and leave a teenager in charge and think everything is going to be a-OK. Glen’s fifteen year old sister Alex (Christa Denton) is given that responsibility, and she immediately throws a party where her friends make Glen levitate. Other strange happenings make it feel as if the house was haunted rather than demonic influences at work, playing with the viewer’s head in expectations of what the forces of hell are really like.

Let’s go back to Terry. He’s the kid your parents warned you about in Satanic panic America, though Glen’s parents wave off his obsession with the forces of darkness as Terry processing the death of his mother. If only they knew Terry is the one discovering a particular metal album is an instruction manual to opening a portal to hell and by playing the record backwards they can find out how to close the gate. Terry’s the one who looks at the hole and tells Glen, with all the sacred knowledge of a supernatural exterminator, “You got demons.”

Though Terry isn’t the one carrying out the sacrifices. That was Alex’s dumbass crush who threw the family’s dead dog into the hole, not knowing this was one part of a multi-step ritual.

In a tense moment when the kids try to seal the hole, the infestation of demonic forces grows to include hell minions. The creature design of the minions are fantastic, and the effects used to bring them to life are a mixture of stop-motion animation and forced perspective. The behind-the-scenes pictures of actors in the minion suits are wild and gives an extra appreciation to the crew who made the film.

The Gate is a coming-of-age film as well as a good starter horror movie for kids. Glen and Terry would be the type of kids hanging out with the Goonies if they lived in a seaside town, but instead they are isolated in the suburbs. We never see them go anywhere farther than their own literal backyard. Instead of going out to find adventure, the adventure finds them not in the form of pirates and treasure, but with minions in a suburban hell.

Glen and Terry are introduced to the reality that evil forces exist. There is always a hub in these movies where a gang of kids would meet, usually a treehouse. At the start of The Gate, the tree in the backyard is uprooted and the treehouse atop it is destroyed, signaling the loss of innocence about to come. When we finally get to see the hellscape taking over the world, it’s not the fire and brimstone land of a young Sunday school attendee’s nightmare; instead it’s a world turned bleak and grey, presenting Glen with an overwhelming sense of isolation in a lonely apocalypse.

Shannon Grant is a writer, performer, adventurer, and horned cryptid living in the wilds of upstate New York. Her work can be found in many small press anthologies such as A Guide to Useless Sidekicks, Catskill Chaos, and The Lizzie Borden House Anthology. She is currently at work on a vampire novella. When not writing, she can be found haunting drive-in movie theaters, karaoke bars, and looking for ghosts in the woods.

PLEASE NOTE: The views and opinions of the staff of Memento Mori Ink do not necessarily represent those of Memento Mori Ink or Crystal Lake Publishing. Thank you for understanding.