The Garth Brothers Enter the Hall of Killers – Third Class

Some horror villains announce themselves with an instantly recognisable mask. Others have a trademark weapon, a memorable catchphrase or enough sequels to require their own shelf in HMV. Andrew and Morris Garth have none of those things. What they do have is an enormous Gothic mansion, a network of underground tunnels, a spectacularly dysfunctional family history and, apparently, an extraordinary ability to remain completely unnoticed beneath a property regularly invaded by drunk college students. That is more than enough to earn them a place in the Stalk & Slash Hall of Killers.

The murderous residents of Tom DeSimone’s 1981 slasher Hell Night are officially entering our Third Class tier, and we’re inducting them properly as The Garth Brothers rather than simply Andrew Garth. After all, there are two of them down there, and Morris deserves recognition for putting in a shift too.

Hell Night at Garth Manor

Hell Night begins with exactly the sort of decision-making that powered the entire early-1980s slasher industry. Alpha Sigma Rho has an annual initiation known as Hell Night, during which pledges are taken to the abandoned Garth Manor and locked inside until morning. This year’s lucky contestants are Marti, Jeff, Seth and Denise, who are told the gruesome story of the family who once lived there. According to the legend, Raymond Garth murdered his wife and children before killing himself twelve years earlier, but the body of his youngest son, Andrew, was never discovered. Naturally, the local story became that Andrew might still be somewhere inside the estate.

Peter and his fellow fraternity members don’t genuinely believe the story, of course. They’ve rigged the manor with fake scares and secretly return to continue frightening the pledges, meaning that strange noises, movements and apparent supernatural activity can initially be dismissed as part of the prank. It’s actually one of Hell Night’s cleverer ideas, because the characters have been deliberately placed inside a haunted-house attraction where they’re supposed to ignore evidence that something is wrong. Unfortunately for them, somebody really is home.

Andrew Garth has indeed survived, but the legend has missed one fairly important detail: so has his brother Morris. The pair have remained associated with the estate, using its concealed passages and underground areas to move around without being easily detected. Eventually Marti and Jeff discover the hidden world beneath Garth Manor and the evidence that somebody has been living there, while the later revelation of a second attacker explains why the supposedly solitary Garth has seemed capable of popping up all over the place.

So… Where Were They During All the Other Hell Nights?

There is, however, one question that becomes increasingly funny the longer you think about it. Hell Night is an annual event. This isn’t the first time some bright spark has decided that locking students inside Garth Manor is an excellent way to welcome them into the fraternity. The whole thing is an established tradition, complete with rehearsed ghost story, planted scares and fraternity members who clearly know their way around the place.

Yet Andrew and Morris have apparently been living there all this time.

So where the hell have they been during the previous Hell Nights?

Were they just incredibly understanding about the whole arrangement? Every year a fresh group of students gets locked inside their house for six hours, people stomp around upstairs, fraternity members install equipment and everybody screams until morning, while Andrew and Morris politely remain in the tunnels. Perhaps they had a little underground sitting room. Couple of armchairs, portable television, kettle in the corner. Morris hears somebody screaming upstairs and starts getting excited, only for Andrew to tell him, “Leave it. It’s August. They’ll be gone by breakfast.”

Maybe there was an unwritten agreement between the Garths and Alpha Sigma Rho. Students get the house one night a year; murderous subterranean brothers get it for the remaining 364. Everybody wins. Well, except Raymond Garth’s property insurance company.

But something is different this year. After apparently tolerating previous Hell Nights without turning them into actual massacres, Andrew and Morris suddenly decide that this particular intake has to go. Why? The film doesn’t give us an explanation, leaving us free to consider the obvious possibility: word reached the tunnels that the little girl from The Exorcist was coming.

Perhaps Morris had been waiting years for this.

“Andrew, you’ll never guess who’s upstairs.”

And suddenly Hell Night is no longer just a fraternity initiation.

Two Garths Are Better Than One

Joking aside, the revelation that there are two surviving brothers is one of the film’s strongest ideas. Hell Night spends much of its running time building Andrew into its monster because he’s the missing child in the Garth family legend. When Seth escapes the estate, gets help and eventually returns with a shotgun, he encounters a large bearded attacker outside the mansion and shoots him. It briefly appears that the creature responsible for the night’s horrors has finally been dealt with, until Seth goes back into the house and discovers that another killer is still waiting.

The twist retrospectively makes the Garths more effective. Characters have been attempting to understand how one attacker can seemingly move around the estate so efficiently, only for the answer to be wonderfully straightforward: there was never only one. That’s also why we’re inducting them together rather than choosing Andrew and pretending Morris was simply helping out. The Garth Brothers are a double act, albeit one considerably less likely to get booked for Saturday-night television.

Their greatest advantage isn’t a signature weapon either. It’s Garth Manor itself. Andrew and Morris understand its rooms, tunnels, concealed entrances and surrounding grounds while their victims barely know where they’re going. People disappear into the darkness, bodies turn up where they shouldn’t and the underground sections reveal how completely the brothers have made the supposedly abandoned estate their territory. The Garths aren’t killers who arrive at the location; they’re effectively part of it.

Gothic Horror Meets the Slasher Boom

Released in 1981, Hell Night landed during the extraordinary explosion of American slashers that followed Halloween and Friday the 13th. Directed by Tom DeSimone from a screenplay by Randy Feldman, the film stars Linda Blair as Marti alongside Vincent Van Patten as Seth, Peter Barton as Jeff and Suki Goodwin as Denise. Blair’s presence also gave the film an unusually recognisable leading performer for an early-’80s slasher, with The Exorcist having already made her one of horror cinema’s most famous faces.

What makes Hell Night particularly interesting is that it doesn’t simply imitate the slashers appearing around it. Garth Manor gives the film a much older Gothic flavour: a huge decaying mansion, candles, a gruesome family history, secret passages, underground chambers and rumours about a deformed survivor hidden somewhere within the estate. Andrew and Morris consequently feel like monsters caught between two different periods of horror cinema. They’re body-count killers from the slasher boom who could just as easily have crawled out of an old dark house movie.

That combination has helped Hell Night retain a cult following even though the Garth Brothers never became household names alongside Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees or Freddy Krueger. The film has continued to find audiences through home entertainment, including its first UK Blu-ray release from 101 Films in 2021 as part of the company’s Black Label range. That edition featured a transfer derived from a 4K scan of the best surviving archival 35mm print alongside interviews and retrospective material involving Linda Blair, Tom DeSimone, producer Bruce Cohn Curtis, writer Randy Feldman and others connected with the production.

Welcome to Third Class

Let’s be reasonable: Andrew and Morris aren’t Premier Class material. Nobody is dressing as Morris Garth for Halloween and becoming furious when everybody assumes they’re just a bloke who’s had an exceptionally difficult week. They didn’t launch a decade-spanning franchise, they don’t have an iconic musical theme and NECA isn’t announcing seventeen slightly different Ultimate Andrew Garth figures every year. But that’s precisely why Third Class exists.

The Hall of Killers shouldn’t only celebrate the icons. Horror history is filled with strange, memorable and occasionally forgotten killers who contributed something distinctive without becoming merchandising empires, and the Garth Brothers absolutely belong among them. They’ve got a body count, a creepy legend, a fantastic location, a genuinely effective two-killer revelation and one of the most questionable long-term living arrangements in slasher history.

More than four decades later, Garth Manor remains a wonderfully atmospheric destination for horror fans, and Andrew and Morris remain an entertaining example of the slasher genre colliding with traditional Gothic horror. We may never discover what they were doing beneath the mansion during all those previous annual initiations, why they suddenly decided this particular Hell Night was the one that required wholesale slaughter, or whether Linda Blair’s arrival simply proved too exciting to ignore. What we do know is that when the Garth Brothers finally clocked in for work, they made it a Hell Night worth remembering.

Andrew and Morris Garth therefore enter the Stalk & Slash Hall of Killers together in Third Class — two brothers, one manor, several dead students and absolutely no satisfactory explanation for what they’d been doing downstairs all those previous years.