Demon Knight (also known as Tales from the Crypt Presents: Demon Knight) is a 1995 horror film directed by Ernest Dickerson, and starring Billy Zane, William Sadler, and Jada Pinkett Smith. Brenda Bakke, CCH Pounder, Dick Miller, and Thomas Haden Church co-star. Demon Knight is a feature-length film presented by the HBO series Tales from the Crypt, and features scenes with the Crypt Keeper (once again voiced by John Kassir) at the beginning and end of the movie. The film was followed by Bordello of Blood; although it is not a direct sequel, the key artifact from this film makes an appearance.
Unlike episodes of the HBO series, the story was not ripped from the pages of EC Comics. The first draft of the script was written in 1987, two years before the HBO series debuted, and it was first intended to be made into a film by director Tom Holland, who planned to shoot it as a followup to Child's Play. Holland hired an FX team to do preliminary sketches, but he ultimately went on to direct the box-office bomb Fatal Beauty. Next the script wound up in the hands of Pumpkinhead screenwriter Mark Carducci, who sat on it for several years before it was given to Pet Semetarydirector Mary Lambert. Lambert had some radical ideas for the script, including casting an African American as Brayker to create a theme that the oppressed people of Earth were its also saviors. Once Lambert went on to direct Pet Sematary Two, which was a theatrical bomb, she couldn't get people to invest in the film. When the script finally made its way onto desks at Joel Silver's Silver Pictures, it was optioned to be the second in a trilogy of Tales from the Crypttheatrical spin-offs. Universal Pictures executives thought the script had more potential than the other two films (Dead Easy and Body Count, neither of which was ultimately produced) and the movie was quickly sent into production with a tentative release date of Halloween 1994[ (though the release was pushed back to January 1995). At this point, two versions of the script were created to solve budgetary problems: one with demons and one without. In the latter, the Collector was a Bible salesman who was using a legion of fellow salesman clad in black suits and sunglasses (later revealed to be demons) as his minions. A film calledDemon Knight with demons that looked like killer yuppies made everyone nervous, so Universal pitched in some additional money to get some demons on the screen.
