Opinion & writing by Tony Frame

I have a vague memory of watching this late at night with my cousin and sister in the living room of my parents house, back home in Dedridge, Livingston. I guess this would have been 1990 or thereabouts. There were two places I would rent films back then. The first one was the Lanthorn library, which was less than half a mile from home. That was my main source of renting films. Even to this day I remember when I turned 18 and had the privilege of being given my own video rental card from there. It meant I had the freedom to rent whatever films I wanted, as opposed to the old system where I had to choose the films myself and then hand them over to my father, who would then hand them over to the librarian for rental. The old system meant that I couldn’t really rent risqué films like A Woman Scorned (1993) for the embarrassment of what basically looked like I was renting a pornographic movie.

Now, every Wednesday was a big day; you could rent films for 50p at the library, instead of the usual £1. These were big savings for me, as I was on the dole back then. And it meant that Wednesdays were always a film marathon day. I would stock up on coca-cola and Monster Munch and fizzy sweets from Asda for this momentous occasion.

The Lanthorn is one of those two-storey concrete blocks from the 1970s. It looks like an art-deco experiment built by students in their first year of studying structural engineering. Tinged in a greyish-white render, it stands alien in the surrounding landscape of council houses and a nearby park. I have a hazily reconstructed memory of the Hotel California album cover which reminds me of the building.

As well as hosting the library, it functions as a community centre, equipped with a canteen and a large hall which was used for midnight mass back in my day. As soon as you enter the building the smell of instant coffee greets you amidst the faint din of the canteen workers going about their business. The library was quiet — as libraries should be — and there was an excited anticipation as I neared the shelves stocked with video cassettes. The afternoon light shines in through the windows, almost like a beacon that’s showing me the way to heaven. Timing was everything. If you arrived too early you risked the previous day’s rentals not being returned – there may have been some good films coming back; people are careful what films they choose to rent when paying full price for them. Arrive too late and most likely all the good films are gone due to the popularity of 50p Wednesdays.

Of the two films I would rent I would generally choose a crime film, or a thriller, or a sci-fi, and a horror film. Always a horror film, no matter how bad it looked from the video cover and the blurb on the back of the sleeve. I loved the genre so much that I always had to rent a horror film no matter what, especially on 50p Wednesdays. And I would always end the day by watching the horror film late at night. It was the rules. Horror films are meant to be watched late at night, in the dark, as close to the witching hour as possible.

Sometimes if the choice of films in the library on 50p Wednesdays was too good to be true then I would rent three films to indulge myself to the fullest degree. That rarely happened though, primarily due to my terrible sleeping patterns back then. I always stayed up too late, burning the midnight candle, playing computer games or watching films, writing bad screenplays – I was lucky if I was out of bed by lunchtime. So my late arrival at the library on Wednesday meant that most of the good films were gone, and I was faced to choose from the horde of B-Movies left.

In fairness, some of those B-Movies were pretty good – films like Monolith (1993) and Night of the Running Man (1995) still have their merits even to this day. Being a big horror fan had its advantages though; it’s not a mainstream genre (even less back then) so there was always generally a good selection of horror films left for me to choose from when I arrived late in the afternoon on Wednesday. It was from the library that I rented such horror classics like Scarecrows (1988) and The Blob (1988) and was introduced to John Carpenter’s classic They Live (1988) for the first time.

IMAGES COURTESY OF IMDB

The other place I rented videos from was the Shell garage, which was roughly about the same distance but in a different direction. And where my anxiety of crossing the road (a dual carriageway) was always put to the test. The garage didn’t have as many films as the library, nor was the atmosphere as pleasant and relaxed (it was literally a shelf in one of the aisles), but they did have more quality films (new releases) than quantity. And the one advantage it had over the library was that it was open to midnight, whereas the library closed at 5 p.m. I didn’t rent as frequently from the garage due the lack of choice, but when my cousin Stephen stayed with us one summer I’m pretty sure we rented The Gate from there.

I remember within five minutes of us watching it that I knew it was my kinda film. It has all the elements of a great eighties horror: two young teens, Glen (Stephen Dorff making his film debut) and Terry, open a gateway to hell in the back garden. And when Glen’s parents go away for the weekend that’s when the mayhem of demonic encounters and supernatural experiences begin. Even re-watching it to this day I still find the minion demons freaky and unsettling. The forced perspective shooting of them means that they blend in with the actors perfectly and look so uncannily real. To clarify what this technique involves there’s a good article on Monsterlegacy.net (click here) that details the process. In a nutshell, the forced perspective technique was achieved by using real actors in the demon costumes on an oversized set, with the camera placed a distance away from them in comparison to the other (non-demon) actors in the scene.

Left to right: Actors in demon costumes to film the forced-perspective shots / the finished product in the film

There’s lots of little memorable gems in the film throughout as well; from Terry playing his heavy metal LP record backwards (which has an incantation to dispel the demons back to hell) to Glen being levitated at the party his sister throws in the house. And then there’s the story that Terry unwittingly makes up about a workman being entombed in the walls, when the house was built, which comes to fruition when the zombified workman terrorises them near the end.

IMAGES COURTESY OF IMDB

Satisfyingly enough there’s no let down at the end either. The gate to hell is fully opened and the master demon rises from the pit and Glen has to face it. The effects there, and throughout, hold up amazingly well for a film that is over thirty years old. And you really do get a feel for the end of world happening.

What makes The Gate work exceptionally well though (outside of the practical effects and the cgi) is the friendship between Glen and Terry which feels genuine in the writing, with both the actors having a good rapport with each other, and then there’s the love / hate relationship Glen has with his sister. It all adds to some nice character arcs, which is rare for ’80s horror films. Usually the characters (with the exception of the protagonist) are merely just victims waiting to be bumped off, one by one, their deaths are devoid of weight to the finality of their lives ending because we don’t really care about them. In The Gate we want the protagonists to come out on top because we feel like we’ve bonded with them throughout the course of the movie. And that, to me, is one of the many reasons why I think it’s one of the penultimate horror films from the ’80s. It has aged well, and I still find it as enjoyable now, as I did way back then, all those years ago.

My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Director: Tibor Takács (as Tibor Takacs)

Writer: Michael Nankin

Stars: Stephen Dorff, Christa Denton, Louis Tripp | See full cast & crew »