On Ken Hughes' Boston-set Night School (1981)

Saturday 9/19/26

Excerpt from this piece on school-based horror films that I'm wrapping up this morning, which is also going to be in my book about horror films that are worth staying up for and thinking about.

For all the chatter about the “Sunday scaries” and the recommencing of another long week before it’s time again for a two-day repose, we’d be amiss not to consider the end-of-summer scaries. Some children and teachers can’t wait for school to begin anew. Clean slate! Old friends! Maybe that girl I like will like me back now that we’re in a new grade!

Others are plunged into a funk. Do I have to go? This is gonna suck. I can’t wait for next summer. No matter how much we may love school, it has its stresses. Academically, socially. The straight A student didn’t come by those marks by being “chill.” Our girl worked her tail off. We’re never going to forget the things that happen here, for better or worse. But hesitant and fearful as you may be, you’re going to have to show up the same as everyone else. Usually it’s not too bad.

Ken Hughes’ 1981 slasher/police procedural Night School serves as perfect accompaniment in making that leap into presumed darkness, if you’re among the terrified or remember marching among their number. It’s the back-to-school horror film version of downing that coffee you made extra strong that’s remained in the pot for a couple days where it has somehow become blacker yet. A school-oriented horror film to put hair on your chest, which you swim team people can always shave off later.

School takes all forms. The same as it takes people of all ages. We usually associate school with the morning, but there’s this whole other world of learning that comes out at night, as both Dracula and the instructor of creative writing at the adult education center know well. Night School is set around Boston’s Beacon Hill, a place where if you take a nocturnal ramble among its warren of streets, complete with replica gas lamps, you wouldn’t be surprised to Jack the Ripper race by in an ulster with blood from severed body parts leaking from his bag. Location, location, location. Leonard Mann plays Lt. Judd Austin, the cop trying to solve a series of beheadings. Heads roll often in this sucker. A particularly memorable instance involves the giant tank at the New England Aquarium and a ricochet off an unsuspecting turtle.

Slasher films can be fun, but Night School is a grim affair. The dominant colors are gunmetal gray, “damn, you’ve got the blues” blue, and that aforesaid death-coffee black. The overall effect is dour. Resigned. The setting does a lot of the legwork for the mood. Meanwhile, school goes on, because that’s what school does.

There’s a professor (Drew Snyder) with a penchant for railing his students, which wasn’t seen as awesome in the early 1980s—he’s scolded but not discharged (make a joke here if you must and giggle like a kid in the last row)—but also not as bad as it came to be viewed, and we play the “whodunnit” game while suspecting, à la Black Christmas, that this is likely to prove a problem without a solution, the same of which can’t be said for that last item on your kid’s algebra homework that you haven’t been able to help them figure out for a half hour and counting. Arguably the best horror film set in Boston, a prime locale for schooling, although it’s not as though a ton of hands would be shooting up were the class asked to name some others.