The serial-killer horror film Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever arrives with some caché attached: Danish writer-director Ole Bornedal’s 1994 Nightwatch / Nattevagten was an international hit, one big enough that he was brought in direct the 1997 U.S. remake, co-written with Steven Soderberg and starring Ewan McGregor and Nick Nolte, names not generally associated with the genre. Then again, fellow Danes Nicholas Wending Refn and Lars von Trier, both highly regarded filmmakers whose names one wouldn’t expect to find attached to horror movies, respectively made the English-language The Neon Demon (2016) and The House That Jack Built (2018) — and believe me, they are horror movies with a capital H. Denmark isn’t an internationally recognized font of horror films in the way that, say, Italy, is, but Denmark’s long, cold nights have spawned some dark dreams. And now 30 years after Nightwatch, Bornedal and some of the original cast reprise their roles in Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever / Nattevagten: Dæmoner går i arv, in which the sins and dark dreams of the father are not decades distant.
In a brief but potent opening sequence, a young man — skinny and pale in a red t-shirt, with light blood spatter on his face and on the white collar of his red knitted sweater — sits in an interview room. He’s a psychiatric patient named Bent Segenius Midjor (Casper Kjær Jensen), who, while out on an unsupervised day trip approved because his meds were working so well, cut the throat of a vicar and then scalped him. When questioned about the missing scalp, Bent just repeats, “It belongs to It.”
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