There is nothing quite like a Jean Rollin film. He’s famous for making dream-like erotic vampire movies with loads of nudity and a fascination with women wearing nothing but sheer fabric draped over their naked bodies. It comes as no surprise that he finally made a movie and called it The Nude Vampire.
This one plays out very much like a dream, with scenes that have very little logic to them. Or connective tissue. It begins with three men in masks taking blood from a naked woman in a hood. Another woman (wearing a sheer fabric, of course) is walking down some dark alleyways, pursued by several men in dark clothes and wearing animal masks. A man named Pierre (Olivier Rollin) tries to help her, but before they can escape, the animal-masked men shoot her dead.
Pierre makes it out alive and follows the masked men to a gated building. He sees some other people, dressed in fancy dress, go in. But a man at the gate stops him, for he has no invitation.
The next day his father chastises him for being there for he’s been warned to stay out of his business. But what are they doing in there? And how is his father involved? The next night, he attacks a man just before he gets to the gate, steals his invitation, and crashes the party. Inside, he’s given what is basically a bag to put over his head. The other partygoers are given the same. Then a woman’s picture flashes on a television. That same woman is given a gun, and she shoots herself in the head.
Then the woman from the night before shows up. But how can she still be alive? She drinks the dead woman’s blood. Then another face shows up on the screen. It is Pierre’s. He’s given the gun and is asked to kill himself. Instead, he shoots the guy who gave him the gun and makes a run for it.
I’m explaining all of this clearly, but it is far from clear in the film. Everything is a little hazy, clouded by shadows and fog. The film eventually explains a few things – Pierre’s father is involved in some shadowy experiments with the girl who didn’t die. Apparently, she can’t die. Her wounds heal. But she also drinks blood and cannot stand the sunlight. Maybe she’s a vampire, or maybe she has some kind of mutant genes. They want to find out. They want to find a way to live forever.
At the same time, there is a rebellion going on. Some of the scientists’ workers want to help the girl escape. Others are planning to break in and kidnap her. All of the rebels seem to think Pierre is one of them.
Rollin gives everything a psychedelic dream quality. It is both very well made and cheap-looking. He somehow manages to blend the arthouse with the grindhouse. He’s created something beautiful and ethereal with gratuitous nudity and blood drinking.
For the last several years, I’ve tried to watch every film in a horror franchise during the month of October. I’ve seen the Friday the 13th films and all of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, plus Halloween and Scream and their respective sequels. It has been a fun endeavor. Everyone knows that horror sequels can take a pretty steep decline in quality the further you get into them. For a long time, I tended to avoid them as I didn’t want to taint the originals with terrible sequels. But since I’ve become a bigger horror hound, I like being able to say I’ve watched an entire franchise.
And it is true, oftentimes the sequels are dreadful. But sometimes they can be quite good. Or at least they can take things into interesting new dimensions.
This year I’ve decided I want to tackle The Conjuring universe. Well, I’m not sure I’m going to watch all of the films, as there are a lot of them, depending on how deep you want to go. This is where I definitely say I won’t be reviewing all the films in this franchise.
The Conjuring films follow Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), real-life demonologists who studied the supernatural. There are currently four Conjuring films, but it has also spawned a couple of spin-offs. Three of them follow a possessed doll, and two involve some kind of evil nun.
The Warrens also visited the house in Amityville that contained so many horrors. Amityville Horror spawned two official sequels (which I reviewed here) and a remake, but because you can’t copyright a town’s name, there have been loads of unofficial sequels. I definitely won’t be reviewing all of them.
I’m also not sure if I’ll watch all the Annabelle and Nun movies. I’ll probably dip my toe into them, but if the first ones are bad, I doubt I’ll watch the sequels. But I will definitely watch The Conjuring movies and write about them.
To start this series off, I thought it would be fun to go back and watch the original Amityville Horror. Without it, there would be no Conjuring films.
I’ve seen Amityville Horror a few times now (and I even reviewed it here). It is not a good movie. The pacing is weird. There aren’t enough scares. It never builds any real sense of dread, and in the end there just isn’t any boogeyman or villain.
But there is something about it that makes me keep returning to it. Every couple of years I’ll get a hankering to watch it again, despite me knowing it isn’t as good as I want it to be. I think I want to like it, and after a few years I forgot how not good it is. But I do remember James Brolin’s big hair and awesome beard, and how amazing Margot Kidder looks in it. So I watch it and then go “oh yea, this film is bad.” Give me a couple more years, and I’ll probably watch it again.
One thing I always forget is that Ed and Lorraine do not make an appearance in this film. I always expect them to show up at the end, but they never do. I don’t believe they appear in the book this film is based on. My understanding is that they did show up at the house for some kind of TV special after the book became a hit. So, I guess this film really shouldn’t be included in The Conjuring universe, but as I say, there would be no Conjuring films without this one.
I pretty much stand by my original review, so I don’t think there is any need to rehash those thoughts. I was thinking about the screenplay as I watched it this time, and it is a bit of a mess. My guess is that it follows the book pretty well and, in a supposed non-fictional account, the book is probably pretty scary (at least if you buy into any of this stuff. I should probably note that this is all nonsense. The Warrens were charlatans. They made up most of their stories out of whole cloth and likely fed into the delusions of many others.) But reading a book about a haunting can sound real. Watching a movie like this borders on the ridiculous.
Because unlike something like The Exorcist or Poltergeist, there doesn’t seem to be any real villain in this film. A couple of chairs move on their own, a girl gets locked inside a closet, a priest gets attacked by a bunch of flies, etc. Even at its most hysterical, all we hear is a voice, and a door gets blown off its hinges. We never see the entity or get any kind of explanation for it. The priest (an overacting Rod Steiger) thinks it’s the devil, but his story never really gets going.)
The film literally ends with them just driving away. Nothing really tries to stop them. And that’s it.
This has been a long week. Friday was a long, exhausting day. By the end of it, I had no energy and no brain power for much of anything. I sat down last night and watched Mad Love, a 1935 film starring Peter Lorre as a mad doctor who operates on a famous pianist’s hands and replaces them with the hands of a knife-throwing killer. It’s a good movie, and Lorre is wonderful in it.
I had intended to make that my Friday Night Horror movie. It was a pretty straightforward film, and I figured it would be easy to write about. Then I watched Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. That is not a straightforward movie, and it will be difficult to write about. But I really wanted to write about it. I found it to be a fascinating watch.
I could have still made Mad Love my Friday Night Horror film and then written about this one later on. But I’ve gotten very lax about writing about movies on this site, and I was afraid that if I put it off, I’d never get around to it. But the way my brain works is that I feel this real need to write my Friday Night Horror articles every single week. If I don’t, I feel actual guilt.
But I was way too exhausted to put anything together about this movie last night. So, I could have written about Mad Love, but that would have completed the Friday Night Horror task, and I would have never gotten around to writing about Camp Miasma. Instead, I didn’t write anything last night, and now I still feel obligated to write a Friday Night Horror movie. So here we are, Saturday afternoon, completing the article.
Truth be told, I still don’t think I’ll be able to write all that I want to about this film, but I’ll try.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is this wonderful homage to 1980s slasher films viewed through the lens of pop culture-obsessed, weirdly repressed Millennial eyes.
Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) is a young, intellectual, somewhat pretentious filmmaker who is in the process of rebooting the Camp Miasma franchise. This is a Friday the 13th-esque slasher series that started in the 1980s and spawned numerous sequels before finally rendering itself irrelevant.
She is someone who says things like, “My work explores the intersection of queerness and cultural depictions of monstrosity,” and whose earlier film basically remade Psycho but from the point of view of the shower curtain. She’s also someone who, while watching the original Camp Miasma, sees a shot using a split diopter and joyfully says out loud, “split diopter.”
Which is to say, this is a film about and made for film nerds. People who grew up watching slasher flicks, put their Letterboxd details in their social media profiles, and run blogs dedicated to obscure films. Which is to say, this is a movie made for me.
For inspiration, Kris reaches out to Billy Pressley (Gillian Anderson), the final girl of the first Camp Misma film, who became something of a recluse after that film became a success and who now lives in the abandoned summer camp that the original film was shot in.
Anderson and Einbinder are incredible in this movie. Anderson turns Billy into this sweet, weird stoner who sounds like a horny Dolly Parton. Einbinder makes Kris into a nerdy bundle of nerves who has substituted cinema for real life.
All of their scenes together, I just loved. I didn’t so much love scenes in which she’s video chatting with her girlfriend or her agent or the movie studio people. There is some funny, satirical stuff in those scenes, but through it all, I just wanted to get back to the central relationship between Billy and Kris.
There are a ton of references to old slasher films throughout this, and even direct references to Sunset Boulevard, and probably a thousand things I missed. The opening credit sequence shows us paraphernalia from all the Camp Miasma films, which make great references to the Friday the 13th films and Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and so much more. I loved that stuff.
There are loads of flashbacks to the original Camp Miasma movie and even long sequences where Billy and Kris watch it together. Again, many of those scenes are throwbacks to real movies from the 1980s. There is one long shot, set to Counting Crows’ “A Long December,” that follows Camp Miasma’s killer – called Little Death, who wears a box mask that looks like a ceiling vent – as he kills half a dozen teens with a spear. The scene looks nothing like anything ever seen in an ’80s slasher; the kills spill CGI blood like a geyser, and “A Long December” came out in 1996.
All of those things were definite choices by director Jane Schoenbrun. I don’t see them as mistakes or some kind of budgetary decision. I think they meant it to come out the way it appears on the screen. Reading other reviews, a lot of folks seem to love that scene. It really took me out of the film. So much of the other scenes we see from the Camp Miasma films look and feel like a real 1980s slasher, so I was really thrown by the intentional decision to make that scene so not like the others.
In a similar way, Schoenbrum gives a very artificial feel to the sets. Many of the outdoor scenes have these glossy, classic movie-looking backdrops. It is a very intentional look and decision by Schoenbrum. This time I wasn’t thrown off and rather loved it, but I still am not smart enough to understand exactly what he was trying to say with them.
It has a lot to say about living inside your own head. Kris talks to Billy about how she has difficulty enjoying sex because she can’t allow herself to just live in that moment. To have an orgasm, she has to leave her own body somehow. The film plays with these ideas in some really fascinating ways. Again, I’m not smart enough to understand all of it. But I will say the villain’s name – little death (or le petite mort in French) is slang for orgasm in France.
It isn’t a perfect film. I’m perhaps a little too old to understand some of what the film is doing. And I grew up in spaces that were very far removed from the queer experience, something this film is very much delving into. But it is a very good film. One I like more the more I think about it. I’m very much looking forward to watching it again. I will very soon be watching Schoenbrun’s other films.
On Halloween night 1992, the BBC aired Ghostwatch, a scripted television movie that had been shot a few months earlier. It purported to be a live event – an investigation into a paranormal occurrence at a house in London. They did an amazing job at it.
They hired Michael Parkinson, a real-life TV presenter and journalist, to host the show. He sits in the studio with Dr. Lin Pascoe (Gillian Bevan), who is a true believer in the paranormal. Also in the studio is a phone bank where they take phone calls from folk who have also experienced strange activity in their lives. This is something real news programs did at the time on the BBC. They say the real phone number was inundated with calls from actual viewers. You might call this the English version of the War of the Worlds radio program Orson Welles did many years prior.
On location is Sarah Greene, also a real television presenter at the time. Her crew is portrayed by real BBC crew members. The house is owned by Pamela Early (Brid Brennan), who lives there with her two daughters, Suzanne (Michelle Wesson) and Kim (Cherise Wesson).
They get all the details right. I remember watching similar shows when I was growing up in the late 1980s/early 1990s. There were lots of pseudo-documentaries on during the Satanic Panic, and folks like Geraldo Rivera were always doing paranormal specials. It feels very real.
Parkinson is perfect for this type of thing. He sits and talks to Dr. Pascoe for a bit, then he’ll throw it to the phone or the location shoot. It all feels like a live shoot, as if he’s working off the cuff just a bit. Sarah gives her part a nervous energy, like someone who doesn’t really believe this stuff, but is still just a little bit scared at first.
The film starts off a bit slow. There is no indication that any of it should be taken seriously (the ghost stuff, I mean; the movie is deeply serious in its setup). But then weird things start to happen, but slowly. Some viewers call in saying they saw a shadowy figure in the girl’s bedroom. In the studio, they play the clip again. Something is visible for just a second. It looks like a man standing by a curtain. But the hosts say they see nothing. They look at it again, and the figure we saw is gone.
There are several moments in the house where we see flashes of something or someone. Stranger things happen. Loud noises occur. Tensions build. And build some more. I know this thing is fake, but it still got me. It took me a little while to get into its groove. Because they got the production values so perfect for an early 1990s TV show, I was taken back to my youth. This is exactly the sort of thing I would have watched as a teenager, for real. But it’s now the sort of thing I’d scoff at. But once it got going and I fell into its lure, I absolutely loved it.
During Mussolini’s reign, the government tightly controlled the Italian film industry. Only films deemed appropriate were allowed to be made. After the war ended, the industry grew exponentially, so by the mid-1950s, they were starting to make films that might appeal to an international audience. In 1956, director Riccardo Freda decided it was time to make a horror film. This would be Italy’s first horror film since the silent era. He made I Vampiri (or The Devil’s Commandment and Lust of the Vampire as it was called overseas) on the cheap with a shooting schedule of just two weeks. He hired his friend Mario Bava as cinematographer and special effects man. Two days before the shoot was scheduled to end, something happened, and Freda dropped out. Bava stepped in and completed the film, making substantial changes to the script.
This makes Lust of the Vampire an important film in the history of Italian cinema. I wish I could say it made it a great film, but the story is lacking. It does, however, look amazing. You can see Bava’s fingerprints all over it.
In Paris, beautiful women keep turning up dead with their blood completely drained out. The local press dubs the killer a vampire.
Sometimes we follow a reporter trying to find the vampire. Sometimes we follow Dr. Julien du Grand (Antoine Balpêtré), a scientist experimenting on corpses to find the secret to eternal life. And then there is Giselle du Grand (Gianna Maria Canale). She lives in a castle and is loosely based on Elizabeth Bathory, the real-life Hungarian noblewoman and accused serial killer who, they say, used to bathe in the blood of virgins. Our Giselle doesn’t do any bathing, but she does drink the blood of her victims, which keeps her young and beautiful.
Truthfully, it has been a long, weird week, and I was very tired while watching this. I watched it in my bedroom, lying on my bed. I nearly fell asleep. As such, I had trouble following the plot. But from the reviews I’ve read, everyone has trouble following the plot. It isn’t a well-written story.
But it looks amazing. Mario Bava filmed it in black and white, and he was a master at playing with light and shadow. They say they used only existing sets, but they found some good ones. Giselle’s castle is fantastic-looking. Bava gives it a wonderful atmospheric and gothic feel. They do some great effects with Giselle. They applied makeup in different colors and then applied different filters for different moments. This would reveal (or conceal) different makeup effects, causing her to age and become more grotesque.
It is very much worth watching, especially if you are a Bava fan (and why wouldn’t you be?)
I don’t know how to talk about this movie without spoiling a major plot conceit. So, if you like to go into movies completely blank, I’d skip this review. I will say that I liked it, and if you do go into it without knowing anything, make it past the 30-minute mark before giving up.
And now, on to the review.
One Cut of the Dead is like a horror version of Noises Off! It begins like a micro-budget zombie movie. Or rather, it is a behind-the-scenes take on a group of people making a micro-budget zombie movie that is beset by actual zombies.
As the title of the film suggests, it is shot in a single take. They use a handheld camera with natural lighting. There are some clever moments and a few funny bits, but I spent the first half hour wondering why so many people rated this film so highly. I can enjoy a low-budget horror film, but this felt amateurish in parts.
The camera work was shaky, the acting not great, and numerous moments felt like the filmmakers didn’t know what they were doing. Like they hadn’t rehearsed well enough, or that something had gone wrong, but because they had this single-take conceit, they couldn’t do anything about it. I was mentally writing this review arguing why the single-take idea was a bad one.
But then, right around the half-hour mark, our hero defeats the zombies. There is a triumphant crane shot and actual credits roll. A title pops up telling us we are headed back in time a few months.
We meet the cast and crew of the film we just watched. The fearless director Takayuki Higurashi (Takayuki Hamatsu) is approached by some TV producers launching a new zombie channel to make a one-take zombie film. We get to know everybody a little bit and watch them in rehearsals, etc.
This section lasts about another thirty minutes. Then we watch them make the film we just saw. We get to see all the behind-the-scenes action on how they made this one-take horror film. But we also see why that film was not very good. All kinds of crazy stuff happens, causing everybody to rush around trying to fix it.
This stuff is excellent. It really ties that first act together and makes it worth watching. Those first thirty minutes are tough to get through. I expect more than a few people have bailed before that change is made. So, you do need to stick with it, but if you do you’ll be heavily rewarded.
Remember when Facebook used to be enjoyable? You’d log in, and your feed would be nothing but what your friends had posted in real time and in chronological order. These days, it’s nothing but ads, viral posts from people you don’t know, and stuff from groups you don’t belong to. Every once in a while you’ll see something from an actual friend, but it’s usually a post from two weeks ago.
I hate it, but yeah, I have to admit I still log in. I look at Facebook on my phone when I’m at the doctor’s office, or waiting on my wife, or just bored before bed. I’ve started following lots of different groups that spark even the smallest amount of my interest. I figure the more stuff I follow, the more likely I am to get at least some of it in my feed. That way, it is at least something I’m interested in instead of something I’m not.
It has mostly worked. My feed is now filled with movies and music posts. I still don’t see my friends much, but at least I’m not throwing my phone across the room like before. A lot of my movie groups just post stills from different films. Today I saw some stills from this film, something I’d never heard of before.
But it looked interesting. Well, it looked like a cheesy early 1980s horror film, but there was some nice blocking in those stills and good lighting. But mostly I was interested in it because it starred John Cassavetes. He, of course, was a titan of independent cinema in the 1970s. He directed award-winning films that are beloved by critics and cinephiles. He starred in movies like Rosemary’s Baby, The Dirty Dozen, and The Killers. So, what was he doing in this thing?
I don’t really know the answer to that question. My guess is he needed the money. He often financed his own films, so presumably he used the paycheck from this film to make something he was really interested in.
Wikipedia notes that it was financed through some sort of Canadian tax shelter, so the whole endeavor seems to have been about money. They did hire real filmmakers, though. Besides Cassavetes, you have John Ireland and lots of other working actors, and it was directed by John Hough, who made films like Twins of Evil and Escape From Witch Mountain.
It was based on a book and had a complete screenplay by Sandor Stern, but they say Cassavetes rewrote something like 80 percent of it, causing Stern to remove his name from the picture. You can feel Cassavetes’ hand in the script. You can see where he was trying to make it a more human picture, trying to give his character some real depth. But you can also see where the final cut was out of his hands, and the director and likely the producers/money men pushed it into more provocative territory.
As such, the script feels very truncated, and there are numerous dropped threads. It never quite decides whether it wants to be a mystery, a supernatural thriller, or a slasher. Still, I quite liked it.
It begins like the low-budget horror that it is, with a young woman in a bikini bathing by a quarry pond. She jokes around with her boyfriend, and then he’s brutally murdered, and she’s horrendously raped. At the same time, Tim Galen (Duncan McIntosh) experiences a terrible nightmare where a woman is tortured by a mysterious figure.
Dr. Sam Cordell (Cassavetes) is the small town’s surgeon and head doctor. He’s prone to talking about things like dry intercourse, ruptured uteruses, and the massive amounts of sperm the rapist is leaving behind. Yeah, the dialogue seems to have been improvised by Cassavetes and is very weird.
More rapes and more murders occur. Some of these are staged quite well. There is one murder inside a gothic museum that is particularly well done. Cordell does most of the investigating. I love it when movies have doctors, or journalists, or anyone who isn’t the actual police do murder investigations. There are cops, but the local sheriff tends to bring Cordell into the crime scenes and lets him ask lots of questions.
There is also a journalist/love interest. Laura Kincaid (Kerrie Keane) is new to town, and she doesn’t like it much. She does love journalism, though, and she used some inheritance money to buy the local paper. She’s also invited into crime scenes and the like. Cordell also has a daughter, Jenny (Erin Noble), who is dating Tim.
There is a slight inclination toward incest between Jenny and her father. He’s jealous of Tim. In an early scene, he walks upstairs, and Jenny has left the bathroom door open while she showers. Later, she’ll give him a kiss that is slightly more than a peck. But the film doesn’t really do anything with this; it’s just weirdly hinted at. Similarly, Sam has a backstory about a dead wife and how he basically ignored Jenny when he remarried a much younger woman. But then that whole thread is dropped.
It rushes toward its conclusion in the last fifteen minutes, picking up some goofy supernatural pieces. I’m making it sound terrible, but it’s not that bad. Cassavetes gives it some grounding, and he really does seem to be trying hard. Hough’s direction is also quite good. So, it is a very watchable early 1980s horror film, but also plenty dumb and a bit goofy.
I watched Her Private Hell, the new Nicolas Winding Refn film, expecting it to be tonight’s Friday Night Horror Movie, but it is a mess. I don’t know what it is, but I definitely wouldn’t call it horror, despite there being a serial killer called ” The Leatherman.” I like some of Refn’s films, but sometimes he can crawl so far up his arse that I have no desire to try to figure out what he’s up to.
So, instead of an impenetrable arthouse film, I went with a big, dumb monster movie.
Primate is really a slasher movie, a throwback to 1980s horror with an excellent score that wouldn’t be out of place in a Dario Argento film.
A bunch of dumb college kids travel to Hawaii to spend some time at Lucy Pinborough’s (Johnny Sequoyah) big, modern, and totally secluded house. Her dead mom was a linguist, and she kept a pet chimpanzee that she taught sign language to (and possibly lip-reading). Lucy’s Dad (Troy Kotsur) is deaf, so Lucy and her young sister both know sign language. Something that will sort of come in handy when the chimp goes crazy and they need to keep quiet. Except that concept is only used once, and that barely.
After some rather dull exposition, the chimp gets out and starts attacking our heroes (such that they are). This is where the film gets good. The violence is pretty thrilling (and blood-soaked – this film isn’t afraid of some good, old-fashioned gore). There is a long set piece with the kids inside a pool. The chimp can’t swim and is afraid to jump in the pool, so they are safe there. But the pool isn’t that big, and there is only one way out. This gives us plenty of thrills and scares, and some gnarly kills.
The characters are mostly unlikeable and not that interesting. And they make a lot of ridiculously stupid moves. It is a very dumb movie, but also a lot of fun. It does have that 1980s slasher vibe to it, and you know I am a fan of that.
The great Reggie Bannister passed away this week, so I wanted to revisit this classic horror film that he is most associated with. They say writer/director Don Coscarelli wrote a rough screenplay for this film based on a nightmare he had as a teenager. That makes sense, as this film certainly plays out like a dream. The plot doesn’t always make sense; characters come in and out of scenes without explanation, and numerous moments just seem to exist on their own, outside of reality, or even this film.
In my review of the DVD boxed set and in my Letterboxd thoughts on my second viewing, I note that the plot doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But that’s not entirely true. There is a certain logic to the story; it just isn’t spelled out for you.
An alien, taking the form of a Tall Man (Angus Scrimm), pretending to be a mortician, is enslaving the dead, shrinking them down to size and sending them to his home planet. When he realizes that a young boy named Mike Pearson (A. Michael Baldwin) has seen him at work, he aims to kill him, his brother, Jody (Bill Thornbury), and their pal Reggie, the ice cream man (Reggie Bannister).
That’s basically the plot, more or less. And maybe it’s not exactly correct. The film isn’t big on explanations. And this doesn’t in any real way explain what makes this film so much fun to watch.
There are some wonderful visuals in this film. There is a scene where the ice cream truck crashes, and it is backlit at night, and it looks like a million-dollar movie. There is a moment when Mike is lying in bed, but then it turns into a grave with the Tall Man standing behind him, and these corpses come out of the grave and grab him. That turns out to be just a dream, but it is still effective.
At one point, our heroes go into this room filled with these strange little barrels, and two metal rods stick out of the floor. It is a simple set, but the way it is built and the way the scene is set, combined with the music, makes it utterly creepy.
Angus Scrimm is wonderful as the Tall Man. He has just a few lines, but the way he looks and stands and actually says those lines is iconic. Then there are these little people dressed in robes that make them look like Jawas from Star Wars.
I haven’t even mentioned the silver balls. Those freaking silver balls are the thing that everyone remembers from these movies. They fly through the sky with two blades sticking out. When they get you, they stab you in the head, drill into your skull, and blood sucks right out.
All of this is so strange and original; I just love it. None of it really gels together. It does feel like Coscarelli took these disconnected dream images and tied them all together. There are little oddities as well. Like, why is Reggie an ice cream man? He drives around in an old-school ice cream truck and even wears a cute little uniform. There is one moment where he pulls up to the Pearson house and starts jamming on acoustic guitar with another guy. I swear Coscarellit must have just known some dude with an old ice cream truck, and Bannister must have wanted to show off his guitar chops.
It is that kind of film. One where a guy had this idea for a film and really wanted to make it. So he gathered up the money himself, got some friends to work with him, and just went for it.
I’m shocked I’ve never written about this movie before. I did review the sequel, Exorcist II: The Heretic, for Cinema Sentries. I would have sworn I reviewed Exorcist III, but I can’t find it anywhere. The Exorcist is often considered to be the greatest horror movie of all time. I’m not quite in that category, but it is certainly a great horror movie, filled with some incredible set pieces, practical effects, and performances. It is truly a terrifying film. I’ve watched it several times, but it has been a good eight years or so since my last viewing. I always forget how slow it is for much of the movie. How it takes its time getting to the absolute terror. I remember it begins in Iraq, where an excavation digs up some old weird relic. But then in my mind, after a brief introduction of our main characters, things get dicey quick.
I remember the projectile vomiting, masturbating with a crucifix, and “The Power of Christ compels you!, and that incredible image of the priest standing before the house bathed in shadow and light,” all coming fairly quickly in the film.
But that isn’t how things play out. The film takes its time getting to the possession. We are introduced to Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), a famous actress working on a film in Georgetown, and her young daughter Reagan (Linda Blair.) We spend a little time on the film set, and at home with the servants. Mother and daughter have a very nice rapport. Burstyn is wonderful in these scenes, very natural and warm toward her daughter. Blair is terrific too, just beaming, which makes her transition into something so evil even more frightening.
But we also spend a lot of time with Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller), a priest who is also a trained psychologist. He’s grown tired of his job, and is no longer sure of his calling. His mother is also very ill, and she’ll die before things really get going. There is also Lee J. Cobb as a cop investigating the death of one of the characters who seems to have been thrown out of Regan’s window. I wish they’d done more with him, actually.
There is an assuredness to director William Friedkin’s filmmaking in these scenes. He takes his time here, letting us get to know these characters, knowing we’ll wait for the horror to begin.
But he does tease us a little. Chris discovers a Ouija board and asks Reagan about it. She admits she’s been playing with it by herself and often talks to a spirit called Captain Howdy. We’ll see it move on its own. During a dinner party, Reagan will come downstairs in her nightgown, point to one of the guests, tell him he’s going to die, and then urinate on the carpet. One night Reagan’s bed starts shaking violently, and she takes on an angry, vulgar personality.
Chris takes her to a series of doctors, and they run a series of tests, but cannot find anything wrong with her. Again, Ellen Burkin is so good in this film. That playful, kind woman fades into a mother who is desperate and angry, filled with concern for her child. Psychiatrists are brought in, but they are no help. Eventually, someone recommends an exorcism. They don’t believe in that stuff, but if Regan thinks she is possessed, then maybe it will help.
Father Karras is brought in, and he brings Father Lankester Merrin (Max Von Sydow), an older priest who has previously done an exorcism. This is the last half hour or so. Things get intense.
By building things slowly, by letting us have numerous character moments, we really care about the actual exorcism and how it turns out. It is a wild final act to the movie. In the previous scenes, Friedkin’s camera is carefully placed. He creates some wonderful images and moves his camera fluidly. For the exorcism, things get chaotic and crazy.
One of the things I noticed this viewing is that all the scenes in that bedroom throughout the film, when Reagan is dealing with the possession, always cut before things are resolved. She’ll shake and curse, telekinetically throw things around the room, and blaspheme. But then it will do a fast cut to something else. Something more relaxed. We rarely see Reagan calmed down or anything resolved until the end. That keeps us on edge.
This is a very good movie. I especially love the practical effects. I have no idea how they did some of the things they put Reagan through (poor Linda Blair; this must have been a nightmare shoot for a 14-year-old girl). But they look amazing.
I do love this film, but never quite as much as I want to. Critically, I can appreciate the slow build, but ultimately I’m kind of ready for things to get going a bit before they really do. I think I’ve probably seen it too many times to truly be shocked by it anymore. But really, this is a terrific horror film.
