Trivia / Demon Knight

• Throw It In!: Billy Zane came up with the gag of The Collector opening his mouth to reveal a sponge that Roach can use to remove Brayker's blood seal.
• Starmaking Role: For Jada Pinkett, who next got the romantic lead in The Nutty Professor (1996).
• What Could Have Been: The film's script has an interesting history before it was made into a finished film:
  • The original draft for the film was written back in 1987, two years before the show started, and was intended to be Tom Holland's follow up to Child's Play. Holland was hoping make the film with Chris Sarandon as The Collector and Tommy Lee Jones as Brayker. He ultimately went on to direct the bomb Fatal Beauty, but not before he hired an FX team to do preliminary sketches for this version.
  • Next the script ended up in the hands of Mark Carducci, screenwriter for Pumpkinhead, who sat on it for years until he gave it to Mary Lambert, the director of the film version of Pet Sematary. She planned on directing it after finishing the second Pet Sematary film, but when that bombed the script was shelved again due to lack of interest from investors.
    • One of her ideas for the film (among others) was that Brayker would be portrayed by an African American man to create a theme that the oppressed people of Earth were also its saviors.
  • After that, the script went to Full Moon Features, but budgetary constraints held up the production.
  • When it finally made it's way to Joel Silver, it was optioned to be the second film in a proposed Tales from the Crypt film trilogy, but Universal Studios thought it should go first because it was "the most Tales-like" feature out of the three.
  • Two versions of the script were then made in case budgetary issues reared their head. One with demons and one without.
    • In the non-demon script, the Collector was a demonic Bible salesman (a nod to his original name in the version Holland would have made) who was using a legion of fellow salesman clad in black suits and sunglasses as his minions. A Similarly Named Work in production around the same time that also had demons that looked like killer yuppies made everyone nervous, so Universal pitched in some additional money for creature effects.
  • Willem Dafoe was considered for The Collector. If you thought Billy Zane was hammy, just imagine the amount of Ham and Cheese Dafoe would have brought to the table.
  • Val Kilmer was considered to play Brayker.
  • The studio initially pushed for Cameron Diaz to play Jerryline but was convinced by the director to cast Jada Pinkett Smith instead.
  • The Novelization was based on an earlier draft of the screenplay, and includes sequences that were ultimately cut for budgetary reasons. One notable example is a sequence where the cast are attacked by flying demons while investigating the tunnels for an exit.