Film: Hell Night (1981)
Killers: Andrew Garth and Morris Garth
Classification: Human
Primary Location: Garth Manor
Tier: Third Class
Film Directed by: Tom DeSimone
The Garth Brothers
Some slasher villains announce themselves with masks, costumes and signature weapons. The Garth Brothers do something rather different. Andrew and Morris Garth are creatures of the place they inhabit, lurking beneath the decaying Garth Manor and turning an old family tragedy into a very real nightmare for anyone unfortunate enough to enter their home.
The killers of Tom DeSimone’s 1981 horror film Hell Night are initially hidden behind the legend of Andrew Garth. The story told to the college students entering the manor claims that Raymond Garth murdered his wife and children twelve years earlier before taking his own life. There was, however, a problem with the story: the body of his youngest son, Andrew, was never found. According to local legend, Andrew survived and remained somewhere inside the abandoned estate.
For much of Hell Night, the film encourages us to believe that the legend is true and that there is a single surviving Garth stalking the students. Eventually, the situation becomes considerably worse. There are two Garth brothers alive within the estate, with Morris as well as Andrew having survived. It is this revelation that makes it more appropriate to induct them together as The Garth Brothers, rather than crediting Andrew alone with the events of Hell Night.
The Legend of Garth Manor
Garth Manor already has everything required for a good ghost story long before Marti and her friends arrive. The sprawling mansion has been abandoned since the destruction of the Garth family, and stories surrounding the property have transformed it into exactly the sort of place a fraternity would choose for an initiation.
During the college’s annual “Hell Night”, Alpha Sigma Rho president Peter Bennett takes four pledges — Marti, Jeff, Seth and Denise — to Garth Manor. Their initiation is simple: they are to remain locked inside the supposedly haunted mansion until morning. Peter recounts the history of the Garth family, including the disappearance of Andrew, and the possibility that the youngest son never left the estate.
Of course, Peter and his friends don’t actually believe they’re placing anyone in danger. They have rigged the manor with tricks designed to frighten the pledges, while Peter, Scott and May secretly return to continue tormenting them.
Unfortunately, somebody else is already home.
The fake scares initially make it difficult for the pledges to recognise when something genuinely dangerous begins happening. Mechanical noises and staged supernatural effects become mixed with actual disappearances and murders. By the time everyone understands that the threat is real, the isolation of Garth Manor has turned the fraternity initiation into a fight for survival.
Andrew and Morris Garth
Andrew is the Garth most directly connected to the legend. According to the story related by Peter, Andrew was fourteen when Raymond Garth murdered his family. Unlike the other supposed victims, Andrew’s body was never recovered, creating the rumour that he continued living somewhere within the estate.
The truth revealed during Hell Night is even stranger. Beneath the manor is a network of concealed passages and underground areas, providing the Garths with a way of moving around the property without being easily detected. Marti and Jeff eventually enter this hidden world and discover the horrifying evidence that someone has been living beneath the house.
More importantly, the film reveals that the students aren’t dealing with a solitary attacker.
Seth, having escaped from Garth Manor to seek help, eventually returns armed with a shotgun. Outside the mansion he encounters a large, bearded man and manages to shoot him. The apparent victory suggests that the surviving Garth has finally been killed. Then Seth returns to the house.
Another killer is still waiting.
The existence of the second attacker exposes the truth behind the legend: Andrew was not the only surviving Garth brother. Morris had survived as well. The pair have remained associated with the estate, protecting their hidden existence and attacking the outsiders who intrude upon it.
That two-killer revelation is one of Hell Night’s more effective twists. The characters have spent the night trying to understand how their apparently solitary attacker seems capable of being everywhere. The answer is remarkably simple — there was never just one of them.
The Killings at Garth Manor
The Garth Brothers don’t possess the elaborate theatrical identity associated with many of the slashers that followed them. There is no iconic mask and no single weapon that defines their attacks. Instead, their effectiveness comes from the environment.
Garth Manor belongs to them.
They understand its tunnels, rooms, hidden entrances and surrounding grounds while their victims barely understand where they are. People disappear into darkness, bodies emerge where they shouldn’t be, and the underground sections of the estate reveal just how thoroughly the Garths have made the supposedly abandoned mansion their territory.
The victims include members of the fraternity responsible for staging the prank as well as the pledges trapped inside. May is dragged away and killed, Scott is murdered on the roof, and Peter’s attempt to escape ends in the garden maze. Denise is also killed and later discovered among the bodies hidden beneath the manor. Jeff and Marti eventually discover the tunnels beneath the house and encounter one of the disfigured Garths directly. Their discovery transforms the film from a haunted-house mystery into something much more physical. The ghosts of Garth Manor aren’t ghosts at all.
They’re still living there.
Seth’s return provides the film’s other major revelation. After shooting one attacker, he believes the threat has been eliminated, only for the second Garth to attack. From this point there can be no doubt that the horrifying history recounted at the beginning of the night was incomplete. Marti ultimately becomes the sole survivor. After Jeff is killed, she manages to reach the gates and escape using the car Seth brought back to the estate. One of the Garths climbs onto the vehicle during her desperate attempt to break through the entrance, only for the confrontation to end with the killer impaled on the fallen iron gate.
Morning finally arrives, and Marti walks away from Garth Manor alive.
Hell Night
Released in 1981, Hell Night arrived during the extraordinary explosion of American slasher films that followed the success of Halloween and Friday the 13th. Directed by Tom DeSimone and written 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.
What helps Hell Night stand apart is its decision to mix the emerging slasher formula with an older style of Gothic horror. Garth Manor isn’t simply somewhere for a killer to chase teenagers. Its architecture, family history, hidden passages, candlelit rooms and underground chambers are central to the film’s atmosphere.
The premise itself cleverly allows the film to play with audience expectations. Because Peter and his friends have deliberately filled the house with fake scares, neither the characters nor the audience can immediately distinguish the fraternity’s tricks from the activities of the Garth Brothers. The prank gradually collapses as the supposedly manufactured haunted house becomes genuinely dangerous.
Linda Blair also gave the film an unusually recognisable leading performer for an early-’80s slasher. Already internationally famous through The Exorcist, Blair plays Marti as the film’s resourceful final survivor, while Vincent Van Patten’s Seth is notable for actually escaping the estate and then making the extremely unfortunate but admirable decision to return and help his friends.
Character and Legacy
The Garth Brothers have never achieved the pop-culture recognition of Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers or Freddy Krueger, but Hell Night has endured as a cult favourite from the early years of the slasher boom. Part of its appeal comes from the way the brothers sit somewhere between different traditions of horror.
They are slasher killers, but they could almost have stepped out of an older Gothic horror story. Their identity is inseparable from the ruined family estate, its gruesome history and the suggestion that something terrible has survived unseen beneath the house for years. Rather than a masked murderer arriving to terrorise a location, the Garths are part of the location. The students are the outsiders entering their world.
The two-brother reveal also gives the killers a distinctive place within the genre. Hell Night spends much of its running time building Andrew Garth into its monster before revealing that the legend itself hasn’t told the whole story. Morris survived too. It retroactively explains how the threat has seemed so difficult to track and turns the old tale about one missing child into something considerably more disturbing.
Hell Night itself has continued to find audiences through home video and later collector-oriented releases. In the UK, 101 Films brought the film to Blu-ray in 2021 as part of its Black Label range, marking its first UK Blu-ray release. The edition used a transfer derived from a 4K scan of the best surviving archival 35mm print, with SD inserts for missing material, and included an extensive collection of interviews and retrospective supplements covering Linda Blair, director Tom DeSimone, producer Bruce Cohn Curtis, writer Randy Feldman and other members of the cast and production.
More than four decades after the film’s release, Garth Manor remains a wonderfully atmospheric destination for slasher fans, and the brothers hiding beneath it are a memorable example of the genre’s ability to combine the modern body-count movie with the traditions of the old dark house.
For that, Andrew and Morris Garth enter the Hall of Killers together as The Garth Brothers — Third Class.