DEMON LOVER DIARY

(1980) Director: Joel DeMott

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SUMMARY:

"In the fall of 1975, cameraman Jeff Kreines was hired to shoot a low-budget horror movie called Demon Lover for Don Jackson and Jerry Younkins, two amateur aspiring directors from Michigan who grew up on comic books and slasher flicks. Joel DeMott joined Kreines for the trip, and with her own camera set out to document this haphazard foray into B-movie film-making. The result is a simultaneously disturbing and fascinating behind-the-scenes record, entitled Demon Lover Diary. At times scarier and frequently funnier than the film being created, DeMott and Kreines’s documentary provides unflinching insight into the chaotic and occasionally violent behavior that transpired on location." - LA Film Forum

VIDEO: SCENE



REVIEWS, INTERVIEWS, CREDITS:

• We're Making A Masterpiece: Truth and Consequences in Demon Lover Diary (Essay)
• 'The Horror, The Horror' LA Weekly (Essay)
  
• 'Forgotten Films: "Demon Lover Diary"' from The Screengrab
• New York Times review

NOTES:

• DeMott and Kreines made Seventeen, a cinema-verite film about teenagers that was deemed too gritty for PBS, which had commissioned it, but which went on to win the Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the 1985 Sundance Film Festival.
• Ted Nugent appears in the film loaning the production several guns from his home arsenal.
• Born in Washington DC, Joel DeMott attended Radcliffe College and the Massachuettes Institute of Technology. DeMott, who now resides in Coosada, Alabama with her partner and long-time collaborator Jeff Kreines, has made a number of films about the South: Montgomery Songs, Down on the Farm, 36 Girls, God & Country, and Goldbug Street. Demon Lover Diary won the Los Angeles Film Critics Award for Best Independent Feature, and has screened in London, Edinburgh, Berlin, Rotterdam, Sydney, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Athens, and The Hague.