With George Romero's Diary of the Dead, the "horror movie as pseudo-home video artifact" category that already includes The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield (and, in a way, Brian De Palma's Redacted) is an official subgenre, one that has been handled by spirited amateurs, old masters, and slick, gimmick-seeking pros. Yet the unacknowledged granddaddy of this type of film may be an actual documentary that, despite having developed a healthy cult status from festival appearances, has never been legally distributed or released on video. It's the 1980 Demon Lover Diary, a record of the making of a no-budget fright flick in the mid-1970s. That movie was released in 1976 and alternately known as The Devil Master and The Demon Lover. (Not to be confused with the 2002 Olivier Assayas film demonlover or the 1987 Scott Valentine vehicle My Demon Lover, though now that we mention it, does anybody know what ever happened to that movie's lead actress, Michele Little? She was cute as a bug's ear.) The documentary was shot by Joel DeMott, the girlfriend of Jeff Kreines, who had been hired to work on the horror picture as cinematographer. (DeMott and Kreines were both MIT grad students who had studied with documentarian Richard Leacock.)

Kreines and sound man Mark Rance were induced by director-writer Donald Jackson and his star and co-director and co-writer, Jeff Younkins, to sign on to help them realize their labor of love, partly with an agreement to allow DeMott to record the process. But it soon became clear that Jackson (who installed his new friends in a room at his mom's house) and Younkins were flying by the seat of their pants and that they didn't exactly love having their incompetence preserved on film for posterity. From what we're shown, Jackson and Younkins have no visible talent of understanding of the craft of film, but they do have something at least as important to anyone hoping to make a career in The Industry: a scary, mesmeric ability to get their way, at least temporarily. (The cast of their movie included Gunnar Hansen--"Leatherface" from the original Texas Chain Saw Masssacre--as a professor of the occult, and Marvel Comics artist Val Mayerik. They also somehow talked Ted Nugent --no relation, thanks for asking!-- into lending them the use of his house and some of his well-stocked arsenal.) Jackson appears the be the more convincing talker, but Younkins really puts the "labored" into "labor of love". His character in the movie wears a single black glove throughout his performance; it turns out that this is because he lost a finger in an industrial accident, which, it's strongly implied here, was staged deliberately so that he could plow the insurance money into the movie's budget.

The ghouls in The Demon Lover are pure plastic, but the galloping paranoia, delusion, personal resentments, and general sense of festering mania captured in Diary are the real thing. Anyone who's spent time around no-frills filmmaking sets will experience a shiver of recognition as the outsiders, who have ceased to hide their contempt for the true believers, hole up in their corner of the house where they are not welcome, begin to feel the effects of sleep deprivation, and snicker and giggle while chanting, "The Demon Lover sucks, The Demon Lover sucks, heigh-ho the derry-oh..." The movie ends with our heroes getting the hell out of Dodge, fleeing Ted Nugent's property by car and convincing themselves that they're being followed and can hear gunshots. The strangest thing about all this may be that it did not signal the end of the careers of the central players. More than half a dozen years later, 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. More surprisingly, Donald Jackson has subsequently forged a long career for himself as a writer, producer, and director of movies with such eye-catching titles as Roller Blade Warriors, Lingerie Kickboxer, Rollergator, Guns of El Chupacabra and Hell Comes to Frogtown, which starred Rowdy Roddy Piper and Sandahl Bergman and which I once watched most of on USA Up All Night while blitzed out of my mind!. As for the nine-fingered Jeff Younkins, he is the author of the well-regarded Combat and Survival Knives: A User's Guide.