Some of your universe's critics, as usual, do not appreciate Mr. Rebane's work. For example, reviewer coliver calls the film "a confusing morass of time periods and storyline that threatened to put me to sleep." Reviewer FilmFatale writes, clearly blasphemously, "Really, really terrible, even for Rebane." And reviewer preppy-3 calls the film "A no-budget mess."
Read on for a much more accurate appreciation of The Demons of Ludlow...
The film opens in the small, snowy town of Ludlow. A curly-haired, bearded man wearing a preacher’s collar, Chris, enters a house where a woman wearing skimpy lingerie, Sybil, is trying on clothes in the bedroom. He tells her she has to behave for the town celebration. “I don’t want any scenes.”
“I won’t go, then,” Sybil says. She adds, frustrated, “I’m so sick of it. Be nice, Sybil. I want you to be more sociable, Sybil. Don’t smoke, Sybil. Don’t drink.”
At the town celebration—what would probably be called colloquially a “hoedown”—the mayor says, “Two hundred years old. Now that’s something really worth celebrating. And the man who founded this little speck of earth should be congratulated.” He then has two men wheel in a special gift from England—from the estate of Ephraim Ludlow III in England, descendant of the founder of Ludlow. The gift is a white piano (actually a harmonium, which is indistinguishable from a piano).
“I don’t want to get too close to that thing,” says a young blond man, for reasons that will never become apparent.
Later, the town holds a ceremony in the town hall to christen the piano. The bearded preacher says a quick prayer and introduces an old woman who will play the piano/harmonium, which sounds like an organ. As she plays, some members of the audience seem to be affected, even hypnotized, by the music. Also as she plays, a young couple sneaks out of the hall and into a nearby hayloft to have sex. Director Bill Rebane masterfully intercuts the sex scene with the woman playing the piano, building to a shocking climax as a disembodied hand that glows green attacks the young woman at the same time as somebody shoots the young man with a Revolution-era flintlock.
At night, we follow Debra, a reporter from outside Ludlow assigned to cover the story of the town’s bicentennial, and her photographer Andy as they eat at a local restaurant. Debra reveals she was born and raised in Ludlow and she heard stories about the place from her grandfather.
“You sure had me fooled,” Andy says. “You’ve got ‘city’ written all over you.”
Later the same night, Preacher Chris scolds his wife Sybil for drinking, then he walks over to the town hall, saying he thinks he left his keys in the lock. While he is gone, Sybil sees her bedroom door moving but there is nobody there, and she waits, confused, until Preacher Chris enters the house later.
The next day, Debra searches for more information about the old piano (it is not clear why she becomes so obsessed with the instrument), but the mayor tells her, “Sorry, Debra. Everything this town had burned up when we lost our town church. You must have heard about that fire from your ma or your grandpa. Besides, we’ve had our share of troubles. Why bring it up?”
At night, Debra (and her remarkable head of hair) goes to the town hall to find out more about the piano, unaware that a young woman is watching her from outside the building.
When Debra touches the piano, a picture on the wall jitters and falls, the glass frame smashing. She is also startled by Preacher Chris, who sneaks up on her for no apparent reason. She asks him whether the piano was in Ludlow before, but he says he doesn’t know. Then he quickly admits that it’s common knowledge the piano was in Ludlow with Ephraim Ludlow, the town’s founding father. She leaves and Preacher Chris bends over the picture — and we see behind him a floorboard pop up and demonic pointed fingers creep upward from beneath the building.
Later, mysterious occurrences occur in Preacher Chris’s house, occurrences so mysterious and frightening they could have occurred in a silent film. A chess piece falls over. A fireplace poker rises into the air. A table shakes slightly. As if this weren’t frightening enough, the old pianist walks over to the town hall in the middle of the night and starts playing music as the piano begins dripping blood.
Meanwhile, the pianist’s daughter Emily, a young woman with special needs, plays with her dolls. As she cuts one doll’s hair, we see a clown doll rise into the air behind her. Also, tears drip from another doll, and a ghost child sits on a rocking chair. When Emily goes downstairs, she sees the ghosts of Revolutionary War-era Ludlow citizens eating and having what can only be described as a food fight. When they see the young woman, they approach her, their fingernails sharp and their hands bloody for unknown reasons.
Rather horrifically, the ghosts rip open Emily’s shirt and then rip her apart, gluttonously eating her flesh.
Elsewhere, another woman is attacked telekinetically in her bathroom by the ghost of the young girl watching from behind the mirror. The shower curtains open suddenly and the sink explodes in a shower of sparks.
In a classic sequence, the town’s prominent citizens meet in the pianist’s house to honor Emily’s memory, and they discuss calling for outside help. The mayor says, “Now wait just a minute. We’ve been taking care of our own business too long to go running to outsiders for help. This whole nightmare doesn’t concern anyone else. We’ve got to deal with it.”
Preacher Chris disagrees, and he warns the others, “You better not get caught alone because I swear to you, what Ephraim Ludlow has in store for this town is gonna make what happened in this house look like a church picnic!”
Debra and her photographer Andy continue to investigate the piano (clearly the only story of any importance in the local area). Andy has blown up photos of the piano to reveal an inscription: “Walls of sound, soul cries, eternal rest.” They put together what they have found out: Ephraim Ludlow was exiled from the town to Europe along with all his possessions, including the piano. “A hundred eighty-five years later,” she says, “he sends it back.”
“He’s getting kind of old by now, isn’t he?” quips Andy.
She corrects herself, somewhat confusingly: “All right, so his family, his deceased grandson, sends it back. Why?” She thinks the family sending the piano back to Ludlow is, somehow, an act of revenge on the town.
Preacher Chris confronts the mayor again, alone this time. Chris wants to call in some help but the mayor refuses. In an impressive stylistic maneuver, Bill Rebane zooms in on a mirror as the confrontation gets heated. “Pray, why don’t you?” the mayor says sarcastically to the preacher. “Pray!” The director then zooms back out to a master shot of the room.
Preacher Chris has had enough. He goes to the town hall with a crowbar. Instead of using it to destroy the piano, he taps on a concrete wall and finds a hollow spot, which he begins to open up with the crowbar, digging through the wall. Mysteriously, the piano begins to play by itself. More mysteriously, back at his house, a glass of wine floats through the air and then returns to a bedside table, where a worried Sybil, who did not see the ghostly occurrence, sips from it. Finally, Preacher Chris finds an old scroll hidden behind the wall, so he sets it on a table next to the piano, then raises the crowbar to smash the piano, only to see the scroll burst into flames. He puts out the flames and runs back to his house just as Sybil’s bed begins to shake and rise into the air, causing her to, sensibly, start screaming at the top of her lungs. Suddenly, a ghost appears riding a horse. It approaches Sybil, who is now inexplicably wearing a summer dress and hat, and then the ghost shoots her with his rifle.
The same night, Debra and Andy return to the town hall to take more photographs of the piano. After this uneventful assignment, they return to their car and notice the town is empty and quiet (as a town might be in the middle of the night). Debra says, “It’s like a ghost town.” She adds, somewhat confusingly, “I don’t have a weak stomach, but I do have goosebumps.”
As they drive away from Ludlow, they see the ghost of the young girl on the road. Andy takes photos, but she quickly vanishes. When they develop the photos, however, the ghost does not appear.
The next person to die is Ann, the piano player, who is surprised in her bedroom when two ghost girls arrive from her closet and begin pelting her with rocks taken from a basket.
Then they summon a demonic hand from the ceiling; the hand lowers a noose, which the ghosts fasten around Ann’s neck so the demonic hand can pull her upward through a hole in the ceiling.
Later, Preacher Chris shows Debra what he found behind the town hall wall: “These are the original Ludlow documents. The history of Ludlow.”
“I’m afraid I still don’t understand,” says Debra, so the preacher explains that Ludlow is cursed. After the town’s founding, the townspeople cut off Ephraim Ludlow’s hands, apparently because he played the piano too much. All the descendants of the original townspeople are cursed to be killed by supernatural means. Also, a doctor cast the curse when he blamed the town for the death of Ephraim Ludlow’s daughter. Looking at the photos of the piano and the inscriptions on its surface, Preacher Chris solves the mystery: “Oh my God. That’s it. Ephraim Ludlow’s ghost is in that piano. And I think I know what he wants. His hands!”
At the same time, the mayor walks through the forest for unknown reasons and is startled by a tree stump that explodes with sparks.
The mayor runs to the town hall, where he finds three swordsmen (possibly musketeers; also possibly pirates) who cut off his head.
Preacher Chris and Debra go back to the piano, which begins playing by itself. Horrifyingly, a face appears behind the wood where the sheet music should go!
When Preacher Chris takes an axe to the piano, it flies into the air, then smashes into the stage. In a shower of sparks, the ghosts of Ephraim Ludlow and his daughter, and a lot of other townspeople, appear in the town hall and commence with a community dance. When they see Preacher Chris and Debra, they grab them and pull them toward Ephraim, who sentences both of them to execution. They use a sword to cut off the preacher’s hands, and then Debra is transformed into a dress-wearing woman. She runs outside and tries to flee Ludlow, but there is, unfortunately for her, a force field around the town.
The force field only lasts until Andy drives by. Debra returns to her modern self and faints in the middle of the snowy road.
The End
It is evident Bill Rebane was inspired by the success of Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist (1982) when he conceived the horrors of The Demons of Ludlow, as both films are set in small towns and both feature frightening supernatural occurrences that make little sense in the context of real life. For the film's overarching plot, he was most likely inspired by John Carpenter's The Fog (1980), as both films depict horrific events in the past returning to claim the lives of modern-day descendants of the perpetrators. Mr. Rebane, however, takes things further than Mr. Hooper and Mr. Carpenter, adding even more ghosts and floating objects to tell his story of a haunted harmonium. Mr. Rebane, always the master of ambiguity, never reveals the true reason for the haunting, mentioning both Ephraim Ludlow's vengeful ghost, which is hiding the piano, but also pointing to Ephraim Ludlow's doctor, who apparently cursed the town after Ephraim's death and the death of Ephraim's daughter. Was the curse separate from the haunting? Which deaths were due to the curse and which to the haunting? And who was responsible for the force field surrounding Ludlow for roughly two minutes? Only Bill Rebane knows for certain...