Anatomy of a Scene's Anatomy: Linnea Quigley Finds New Use for Lipstick in 'Night of the Demons'

In our weekly seriesAnatomy of a Scene's Anatomy, we're going to be taking a look at (in)famous sexscenes and nude scenes throughout cinema history and examining their construction, their relationship to the film around them, and their legacy. This October, we'll be looking at some famous horror movie nude scenes and this week, we close things out with scream queen Linnea Quigley going nuts with a tube of lipstick in the cult horror classic Night of the Demons!

Scream queens rarely get their due outside of the horror world—which is an incredibly positive and embracing community—and with the notable exception of Jamie Lee Curtis, few ever get many opportunities to flex their acting muscles outside the genre. Five-foot-two-inch firecracker Linnea Quigley is one such scream queen who rarely basked in adulation outside the realm of horror cinema. She has worked consistently since making her screen debut in the mid-70s, racking up over 160 acting credits and doing close to 40 nude scenes.

She is also a workhorse, doing the horror convention circuit, meeting with fans, promoting her work, and just generally doing the best she can to stay in the spotlight. While she's been at the center of some memorable moments in horror cinema like her graveyard dance while sporting a Barbie-doll-crotch in Return of the Living Dead...

Linnea's most memorable nude moment on film has to be her lipstick-smeared nude scene from 1988's cult horror classic Night of the Demons. Not to be confused with other "Night Of" horror movies from the mid-80s like Night of the Comet, Night of the Creeps, or Night of the Ghouls, this one finds a group of horny teens throwing a Halloween night party at an abandoned mortuary—this is what teenagers did before the internet. Linnea plays the ditzy Suzanne, the first of the coterie of dim-witted teens to get possessed by a demon.

After passing along the possession to Angela (Amelia Kinkade), Linnea goes into a bathroom where she finds a tube of lipstick and begins dressing up her face. She then moves down to her breasts, though they're clearly a prosthetic here as she inserts the tube into her left nipple...

Her real breasts can be seen moments later when Jay (Lance Fenton) finds her and she clumsily attempts to seduce him...

He really didn't need to do anything, though, because this demon wants to get down with him, and Linnea flashes some bush as she wanders across the room to mount him...

Then she shows off her demon form and presses her thumbs into his eye sockets, killing him...

Horny dudes are always an easy mark in horror films and always will be, so long as they keep thinking with their dicks. There's more to this story than what you see on screen however, as there always is with this column. When Linnea was hired for the film, she had to get a prosthetic casting done of her chest for the lipstick scene, bringing her to the workshop of visual effects supervisor Steve Johnson. Sparks flew between the two and they began a relationship. Later that same year, while both were working on A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, Johnson proposed to Quigley while she was still in creature makeup, as she recounted in a 2004 interview with Horror Asylum...

I actually got engaged on the set of that movie right after coming out of Freddy’s chest. Steve Johnson who did effects on it gave me a ring so that was funny. While he’s hosing my KY jelly off me and after it fell over almost killing us and some others, he still managed to ask me to marry him.

In case you've forgotten, this is the state Linnea was in while being proposed to...

The couple married in 1990, but split up two years later. Thankfully the work they did together on several cult classics will stand the test of time. We hope you've enjoyed this spooky diversion into the world of horror over the past month, we'll be back again next week with a look at two very different sex farces based on the same material: Blame it on Rio and One Wild Moment!

*Non-nude image courtesy of IMDb

Catch up with our other editions of Anatomy of a Scene's Anatomy...

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