Summoning Hell in Attack of the Demons

Eric Power has opened the gates of Hades, but he didn't use eye of newt or toe of frog to conjure up a rampaging horde of hellspawn. Instead, the Austin animator has used the art of cutout animation – the midpoint between collage and stop-motion – to conjure his new creation, bloody supernatural cartoon Attack of the Demons.

Power had the outline for Attack of the Demons before he started his first feature, samurai epic Path of Blood (read "Austin Animator Eric Power Slices and Dices," Screens, April 20, 2018), "but I just felt like it would be too hard to make because I'd never tackled a project that big before," he explained. With its smaller cast and organic woodland settings, Path of Blood seemed like a more manageable first feature for an animator who works basically solo. However, even with his slice-and-dice animation skills honed by his first feature, he still turned to writer Andreas Petersen to flesh out his bare bones idea for Attack. "I wrote Path of Blood and, let me tell you, I ain't no writer and I don't want to do it again," said Power. "Meeting Andreas really let me know that it's possible to tell a good story."

He'd read one of Petersen's unproduced scripts and was struck by how close the tone was to what he wanted Attack of the Demons to be, "so I told him the loose concept of these three friends, and each one of them represents a different aspect of culture. One's a gamer, the film dude, and then the shoegaze music lover." There were a few other elements in place, like a showdown at a survivalist's cabin, that made the final script, and a few others he jettisoned. "I had a pretty cool idea that they were going to escape in a hot air balloon and then they realize, oh shit, some of the demons can fly."

What remained truly constant is the underlying story, a bittersweet tale of realizing you can never really go back home – even before it was possessed by evil spirits that fused human and animal bodies together into unholy chimera. "That's Andreas' genius right there," said Power. "Making it about those characters as maybe somebody that you knew or somebody that you were. ... They're in a diner talking about the things they love, and that's my favorite part of this film."

Yet this isn't just a character piece but a bloody battle against evil forces. "I didn't think of the film as an animated horror," he said, although he did have to concentrate on adapting horror effects to his preferred medium. "There's just so much slime and blood that's far better done hand-drawn, so I had to do a lot of replacement animation where it's hand-drawn except I'm cutting it, which takes double the time." His biggest influences were the gruesome gooey gorefests of the late 1980s and 1990s, with the 1988 remake of The Blob sliming all over his approach to inducing panic with paper. "I just love that none of the characters were safe," he said. "All these people are just nice, and this horrible shit's happening. I think that's scary."

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Attack of the Demons opens in Virtual Cinemas in Oct. 30, then arrives on VOD on Nov. 3. The soundtrack LP composed by John Dixon is also now available on “demon drool” pink and purple colored vinyl at www.shiptoshoremedia.com. Read our review at austinchronicle.com.