Ah 1966, what an excellent year for an animal or human sacrifice, what with any worry about an EXORCIST still eight years away. Hell, even two years off from ROSEMARY'S BABY and the sudden hipster clout it engendered, '66's twin devil offerings, INCUBUS and EYE OF THE DEVIL are polar opposite heralds to Polanski's influential hit: one co-stars Polanski's then-wife (he helped get her the gig) and mirrors Rosemary's feeling of being a wife shut out of some grand conspiracy; the other is off on some crazy hipster dream in a language all its own (literally, since it's the only film ever made in that forgotten 'experimental' language, Esperanto, at least the only one that anyone's ever seen). Soon the fangs would be properly installed in the balls of horror cinema, but for now it was all just rumors and poetry and urban legend. There are those in insider circles who say it was Roman's getting wife Sharon Tate the EYE role that caused the devil to stir from his liquid slumber and languorously stretch through time to snatch her at the prime two-souls-in-one moment via his extra-dimensional Manson hook.
In case you are not up on your Hollywood Satanic conspiracy theories, some say the strange accidents and macabre coincidences during ROSEMARY's production originate in producer William Castle's imagination. Some say he took his gimmickry to a whole new level, way way past his usual chair buzzers and skeletons on strings, instead he went psychologically nefarious, going for the paranoia seed-planting that can spread like wildfire from a single cocktail party to infect the collective unconscious in ways deeper than any normal 'fiction' ever can. As Sutter Kane might say, when everyone believes the legend, the truth warps to accommodate.
Reality is as susceptible to insanity as anyone.
We know it's relatively unlikely a real skeleton is going to come flying through the screen during a revival showing of HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL, that's why we love Emergo! so much. It's not really scary-scary, it's Boo! Ahahah scary. The devil doesn't need skeletons to be scary. An old lady neighbor who baked you cookies for some reason and keeps wanting to be invited in - that's genuinely scary.
Besides, maybe there's a reason superstitions began that does have scientific validity. Maybe not walking under a ladder prevents paint can concussion, and people made shitty ladders back when that superstition began, so they just told everyone not to walk underneath them (the guy making ladders was really mean so they didn't want to suggest he tighten the screws); maybe salt thrown over the shoulder absorbs negative ions; maybe Castle didn't mean to create a real curse by starting the rumor going, but rumors do tend to zero back in, like a curved sacrificial karmic arrow, on the one who started them, even if he himself didn't believe it.. at first. (1)
Cinema's pagan devil culture can't quite capture the ephemeral chain of cause-and-effect karma ouroboros-boomeranging to the point just watching a film creates bad luck, but it can generate a feeling of unease through depiction of the most sophisticated or banal of circumstances if it but tweaks them with little uncanny ripples of fatalistic coincidence that benefit or harm as befits 'the bargain.' With Satan there's usually a gruesome payoff after the subject sells his soul for a drink, where he learns he's "always been the caretaker," and so forth. Ask not whom is sacrificed on the ancient altar because, if you don't know yet, I'm afraid it's going to be... you. You're doing both the killing and the being killed. Two ends of a scroll slowly rolling towards each other, when they meet, your text has disappeared.
So is there free will in a Satanic model of reality? Maybe the one who has 'always been the caretaker' can play Christian the way a closeted gay guy can play straight i.e. stunting his own potential and becoming far less than he was meant to be, or he can let go of the handrails and let Satan's vacuum suction pull him towards the full realization of his unholy destiny. If your Christian family would rather have you as a stunted straight than a fully blossomed gay person then they are the cursed, not you. Thus the devil exists only in advocate position: where there is hypocrisy he brings truth; where there is repression he brings exultation. Only those who revere repression need fear him. And they're likely the ones bound to be caught up in a sex scandal sooner or later. Sexual repression is the devil's distillery. And its release in an evil act is the devil's drunk tank. He gets them going up and gets them going down.
If we apply that logic to the actual making of these films, wife Sharon Tate is doomed the moment husband Roman Polanski helps her get the part in EYE (just how did he get it for her?); Polanski is doomed to exile the moment he shoots a scene wherein a woman is drugged and date raped by Satan. It all connects, from the devil's murky fatalistic machinations within the story--recreating itself through helping Guy get the part in that play (by blinding the EYEs of rival Tony Curtis)--to the reality of its makers (Castle's kidney stones, etc). The devil's happy to crib off your paper, so to speak, to make reality out of the image you made of him. It's as if film was little more than a halfway point, the equivalent of a pie cooling on the windowsill before its opened up and devoured, except the windowsill is a mirror, and the pie sliced open is a young and lovely actress. And the devourer is always... Moloch.
On the other hand, even if for the moment we believe all this fateful 'nonsense,' it's mighty fuzzy logic. Impossible to confirm by any one set of truths, its also impossible to deny--and thus like all fiction that explores this realm, dangerous. The best way to approach it is as a true skeptic, which means you don't scoff at either side, because unlike the pragmatist, you know your own eyes and ears are easily fooled. Thus, a Satanist who believes in an actual physical devil is as rigidly dogmatic as the rationalist who denies the devil's existence, even as a metaphysical concept. When corporeal reality tries to limit itself to expression within either set of parameters, there's always nightmare overflow. Satan never singles out the open-minded for his mischief. It's always the sure and pious ones who draw him, their unsullied souls sticking out like bleached whites in a soiled soul sea, and the ones who are so sure he's a living being succeed in--as far as their own direct experience is concerned--making him one. Eventually every conception of good and evil comes 'literally' true. Especially if you do lots of drugs, are schizophrenic, or have a really bad fever.
I mention all this to eat up the time because when Sharon Tate's not onscreen, EYE OF THE DEVIL is a grand bore. And she's not on an awful lot. The tale of some grand ancient sacrificial rite that ensures good grape harvest at a sprawling South of France winery, it draws us in as outsiders through the eyes of a prim and overbearing wife played by Deborah Kerr. She spends the whole movie trying to get her half-asleep nonentity husband, the marquis (David Niven) of the area to come back to London so she can resume boring him to death with dreary classical music salons. Here in France he's being prepared for some even worse fate (she thinks); it's some some kind of diabolical ceremony and he's being prepared to participate somehow, but how? She must know, so she can stop it, like a nanny no one invited, still chasing after old charges, trying to make them go to bed at nine and drink their milk,long after they've grown up and filed restraining orders.
Tate and David Hemming are sublime, meanwhile, as a pair of magical blonde twins doing all sorts of macabre arcane prepwork, but they're barely in the film at all. Even Niven's angry flogging of a sexy black turtlenecked Tate makes it onto the poster and opens new chamber doors in our telltale hearts but it's just another joyless punitive measure. The film would rather focus in on Kerr's prim outrage over David Hemmings shooting down a white dove with his little bow and arrow. After she first spies him and his equally strange blonde sister, Odille (Tate) as they bring said dove on a pillow into a weird looking Satanic ceremony, Kerr orders them off the property. Like who put this dame in charge? Intentional or not, Kerr is as irritating a nosey parker as Dustin Hoffman in STRAW DOGS or Jessica Biel in the 2003 remake of TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (see my op here). Inviting herself in to take charge of a situation she doesn't understand, she's a mutton-headed missionary enforcing a hypocritically "Christian" concept of law and order wherever she goes, never thinking to examine her own mess or to just go home and resume micro-managing her servants. As her colonialist animus-dominated sense of superiority clouds her awareness of what's actually going on, we begin to understand both Niven's passivity and his eagerness to complete the ceremony to come Every husband in the world stuck with a wife this much of a buzzkill would gladly cut off his own arm to escape her. Soon we're rooting for Niven to pursue the one avenue of escape she leaves open... the one avenue even she dares not follow.
I don't mean to slight Kerr - or this kind of weird set-up. As a kind of unwittingly dosed quasi-pedophile Mary Poppins in THE INNOCENTS (right), Kerr was amazing in a similar role. Destroying the lives of two children through wicked hallucinations of a groundskeeper animus, or else trying to save them from incestuous possession --either way she was invited, hired for the job; she was assigned the position and expected to take full charge. DEVIL is different; if those two weird kids in INNOCENTS grew up to be blonde Satanists, stalking their ample mansion grounds like Warhol superstars able to turn doves into lizards, then Kerr's meddling would just seem petty and aggravating but still it would be nowhere near as depressingy mundane as in EYE. In INNOCENTS, the three of them--or four with the maid--are so cut off from the rest of the world, we sympathize with how lack of connection to the social order can allow things to spin way way out of control.
The animus-incubus-like Peter Quint was the corrupting voluptuary shadow to Kerr's 'proud, white governess, driving her like a flaming hearse into the heart of their young charge's budding darkness. In EYE there can be no psychosexual kinks because all she wants to do is rescue her full-grown husband and bring him back to her tedious London social orbit. We just want to ride with the twins on their weird evil errands, but instead our camera follows Kerr everywhere, like a priest trying to score a fat donation: she lopes after Niven as he lurches hither and yon, as stricken by his impending doom as a bones-tossed Queequeg. She judges and condemns the wicked, wicked twins as they loiter in black turtlenecks; they drive poor Flora Robson to tears because... oh no, the nightmare--it's all happening again... Sign, Robson's always great, and if we can't run amok with the twins we'd be happy hanging around her for awhile, but noooo, on this endless bucolic French vacation we're stuck with the most boring character in a 60-km radius, and meanwhile all this cool stuff is going on behind our backs. She's like my mom used to be, forcing me to hide all my insidious soul-killing vices from her over the holidays because she doesn't understand why anyone would do anything bad for their health. And then wondering why I need to just sleep the day away and then stay up all night.. where she can't get me.
Luckily, the weird devil 'becoming'-ness I mentioned earlier is all over EYE: the music played during the local festival sounds eerily similar to Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" --we'd think it a homage or even rip-off had it not come first--and after that just imagine the film as a vision of what ROSEMARY'S BABY 2 might be like if Rosemary had twins and 18 years later she's still in denial about who their father was, chasing after them with mittens and rubbers as they burn churches and slaughter priests.
All that said, if not for Tate's real life fate lending EYE even more of the eerie black magic ballyhoo synchronicity that plagued ROSEMARY and THE EXORCIST, it would be worthless. But in its eerie prescience it's Tate's equivalent to James Dean's Highway Safety promo film. She's the bizarro super sexy Satanic Virgin Mary that would beget Rosemary Woodhouse and Regan MacNeil, as they in turn would beget a period of widespread Ouija abuse. And that black outfit with the hypnotic pendant or whatever is damn sexy, especially with her bright blonde hair as contrast. It shows us just how far ahead of us England was at celebrating the eerie self-confidence of badass babes in black (Mrs. Peel, we're needed) rather than ever trying to shoehorn them into pretty dresses and tie their hair back in a cruel mirthless bun.
Working our way back out of the EYE, it should be clear now that the devil is alive and well in any representation of his evil influence. His name is a kind of interactive tarot deck wherein having the cards read is what kills you. Believing precedes seeing; the moment your focus settles on a shadow, that shadow begins to spring to life, the way William Castle's rumor mill ballyhoo about mysterious accidents on set could be said to have indirectly led to the Manson murders.
But... even then, man oh man -- there any more boring sacrificial murder weapon than a bow and arrow? Do British schoolchildren stay up at night listening to tales of the haunted archer? Nein! It's too impersonal. It lacks the fears we harbor for the knife. And another thing: if there's anything a drunk like me hates, it's a buzzkill. Everyone else wants whatever is going to happen to Niven to happen, including us. We didn't start watching a movie called EYE OF THE DEVIL so we could see Deborah Kerr scold us for our curiosity about such things. We're going to root for Sharon Tate, no matter what, evil or not, because she's gorgeous, young, and confident. And it doesn't take long before we're fully invested in whatever evil is going on, hoping the devil gets the job done before Kerr comes barging in like mom tromping down to the basement to complain about the noise you kids are making and what's that smell? Smoke? Let me see your eyes!
Mom, go back to bed!
It's hard to believe that EYE, this weird little Satan's Little Helper edition of BONJOUR TRISTESSE came out two years before the relatively old school DEVIL RIDE'S OUT (AKA BRIDE OF THE DEVIL), a rousing, full-blooded Hammer film that seems decades younger in spirit if not in form than the new wave-y EYE. There's no occult real life ballyhoo associated with RIDES, and it doesn't needy any, because it has at least two characters with ample wit and sparkle: Charles Gray as Mataxa and Christopher Lee as the Van Helsing / Quatermass / Sherlock Holmes- type Devil hunter. Dennis Wheatley's original novel was set in the South of France, too, I think -- another connection and proof the area's rife with possibility! Is it some secret knowledge that the south of France is devil cult country?).
RIDE understands--the way few devil movies do--that the trick to defeating pure evil is not to confront it with pure good, but with balance, and a sense of humor to help you roll with the absurdity of it all, but not to the point you kill the atmosphere. That would be truly uncharitable.
Onwards then to the other Satanic offering of 1966 -- INCUBUS.
INCUBUS.... the only film ever shot in Esperanto.... the language of the Satanic mass! Invented by the UN coven to bedevil the globe!
Wondrously pretentious, like a beatnik open mic jazz dance performance if it was shot by Dennis Hopper as an ONIBABA-style psychosexual folk tale for Roger Corman over a single Big Sur weekend, INCBUS would make a good double bill with THE TERROR and/or THE SEVENTH SEAL (as it no doubt intends). The Esperanto angle adds just the right dash of weirdness to the already weird story of a succubus hanging around a healing spring, corrupting infirm male travelers and then hastening their deaths so big daddy Satan can devour their souls. She longs to corrupt a good pure soul instead of just offing the already stained, but her older sister advises against it. Sis is right (I tried it once and look at me - I lost the fight and now am pure as snow.) Then William Shatner shows up, and he's not there for the waters, baby, but to play a variation of Jack Nicholson's lost Napoleonic solider in THE TERROR: sick of war, wandering the Big Sur coast, so noble he can't be beat. Luckily the sisters have a back-up plan when things go south: unleash the Incubus (their brother) on the good soul's equally good (i.e. virginal) sister!
Second thought, scratch the other two, this would actually make a good double bill with the 1961 Liz-and-Dick semi-camp classic, THE SANDPIPER. Both concern a mythic 'impossible love' story between a paragon of virtue and a slutty mankiller who loves lolling in the Big Sur surf and spouting beatnik profundities. One is a studio-backed Vincente Minnelli opus, the other a low-budget concoction from Leslie "Ed Wood on a dime bag of Bergman" Stevens, but both love the Big Sur surf as much as we all do, if we've been there. And if we haven't been, what are we waiting for?
Sure, I know what your saying, man: INCUBUS sounds over-baked... but a succubus feeling sexually violated because Kirk brought her into a church to get out of the sun while she was asleep? Senpreza!
In conclusion, INCUBUS and EYE OF THE DEVIL share a lot more than their date. They're burdened by similar faults: EYE is way too dry and disdainful of its subject; INCUBUS is way too singleminded and didactic. Yet, they share a strength, too: a unique ambiguity about which 'side' they're on, as films. There's an association of good with boring and safe in both. In ROSEMARY'S BABY and THE EXORCIST, the heroines--Chris (Ellen Burstyn) and Rosemary (Mia Farrow) are hip enough that we don't wince at their every word, and the evil spirits--Pazuzu, Guy--vile enough that we don't want to go party with them. But in both these 1966 films, the 'average' voice, the establishment figure, so to speak, is an unshakable bore. He or She is as a fruit tree ripe for shaking. Every second of screen time they are not being shaken to the core is nigh unbearable to us, the hip post-67 viewer. Maybe it was still dangerous in 1966 to feel ourselves rooting for Tate and Hemmings in EYE. That we feared for their plan to be interrupted because of Kerr's imperialist meddling must have felt transgressive in that more innocent, staid era; and in INCUBUS not to spoil the ending, but did we really need to see some old church / patriarchy win out for 665th time against the feminine darkness? No one goes to a devil movie to root for the very thing they went to the movies to escape from, mom! Satano, liberigu miajn malbonajn junajn knabinojn!
NOTES:
1. William Castle got painful kidney stones right as the film was released - didn't you hear?
Besides, maybe there's a reason superstitions began that does have scientific validity. Maybe not walking under a ladder prevents paint can concussion, and people made shitty ladders back when that superstition began, so they just told everyone not to walk underneath them (the guy making ladders was really mean so they didn't want to suggest he tighten the screws); maybe salt thrown over the shoulder absorbs negative ions; maybe Castle didn't mean to create a real curse by starting the rumor going, but rumors do tend to zero back in, like a curved sacrificial karmic arrow, on the one who started them, even if he himself didn't believe it.. at first. (1)
Cinema's pagan devil culture can't quite capture the ephemeral chain of cause-and-effect karma ouroboros-boomeranging to the point just watching a film creates bad luck, but it can generate a feeling of unease through depiction of the most sophisticated or banal of circumstances if it but tweaks them with little uncanny ripples of fatalistic coincidence that benefit or harm as befits 'the bargain.' With Satan there's usually a gruesome payoff after the subject sells his soul for a drink, where he learns he's "always been the caretaker," and so forth. Ask not whom is sacrificed on the ancient altar because, if you don't know yet, I'm afraid it's going to be... you. You're doing both the killing and the being killed. Two ends of a scroll slowly rolling towards each other, when they meet, your text has disappeared.
So is there free will in a Satanic model of reality? Maybe the one who has 'always been the caretaker' can play Christian the way a closeted gay guy can play straight i.e. stunting his own potential and becoming far less than he was meant to be, or he can let go of the handrails and let Satan's vacuum suction pull him towards the full realization of his unholy destiny. If your Christian family would rather have you as a stunted straight than a fully blossomed gay person then they are the cursed, not you. Thus the devil exists only in advocate position: where there is hypocrisy he brings truth; where there is repression he brings exultation. Only those who revere repression need fear him. And they're likely the ones bound to be caught up in a sex scandal sooner or later. Sexual repression is the devil's distillery. And its release in an evil act is the devil's drunk tank. He gets them going up and gets them going down.
On the other hand, even if for the moment we believe all this fateful 'nonsense,' it's mighty fuzzy logic. Impossible to confirm by any one set of truths, its also impossible to deny--and thus like all fiction that explores this realm, dangerous. The best way to approach it is as a true skeptic, which means you don't scoff at either side, because unlike the pragmatist, you know your own eyes and ears are easily fooled. Thus, a Satanist who believes in an actual physical devil is as rigidly dogmatic as the rationalist who denies the devil's existence, even as a metaphysical concept. When corporeal reality tries to limit itself to expression within either set of parameters, there's always nightmare overflow. Satan never singles out the open-minded for his mischief. It's always the sure and pious ones who draw him, their unsullied souls sticking out like bleached whites in a soiled soul sea, and the ones who are so sure he's a living being succeed in--as far as their own direct experience is concerned--making him one. Eventually every conception of good and evil comes 'literally' true. Especially if you do lots of drugs, are schizophrenic, or have a really bad fever.
I mention all this to eat up the time because when Sharon Tate's not onscreen, EYE OF THE DEVIL is a grand bore. And she's not on an awful lot. The tale of some grand ancient sacrificial rite that ensures good grape harvest at a sprawling South of France winery, it draws us in as outsiders through the eyes of a prim and overbearing wife played by Deborah Kerr. She spends the whole movie trying to get her half-asleep nonentity husband, the marquis (David Niven) of the area to come back to London so she can resume boring him to death with dreary classical music salons. Here in France he's being prepared for some even worse fate (she thinks); it's some some kind of diabolical ceremony and he's being prepared to participate somehow, but how? She must know, so she can stop it, like a nanny no one invited, still chasing after old charges, trying to make them go to bed at nine and drink their milk,long after they've grown up and filed restraining orders.
Tate and David Hemming are sublime, meanwhile, as a pair of magical blonde twins doing all sorts of macabre arcane prepwork, but they're barely in the film at all. Even Niven's angry flogging of a sexy black turtlenecked Tate makes it onto the poster and opens new chamber doors in our telltale hearts but it's just another joyless punitive measure. The film would rather focus in on Kerr's prim outrage over David Hemmings shooting down a white dove with his little bow and arrow. After she first spies him and his equally strange blonde sister, Odille (Tate) as they bring said dove on a pillow into a weird looking Satanic ceremony, Kerr orders them off the property. Like who put this dame in charge? Intentional or not, Kerr is as irritating a nosey parker as Dustin Hoffman in STRAW DOGS or Jessica Biel in the 2003 remake of TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (see my op here). Inviting herself in to take charge of a situation she doesn't understand, she's a mutton-headed missionary enforcing a hypocritically "Christian" concept of law and order wherever she goes, never thinking to examine her own mess or to just go home and resume micro-managing her servants. As her colonialist animus-dominated sense of superiority clouds her awareness of what's actually going on, we begin to understand both Niven's passivity and his eagerness to complete the ceremony to come Every husband in the world stuck with a wife this much of a buzzkill would gladly cut off his own arm to escape her. Soon we're rooting for Niven to pursue the one avenue of escape she leaves open... the one avenue even she dares not follow.
The animus-incubus-like Peter Quint was the corrupting voluptuary shadow to Kerr's 'proud, white governess, driving her like a flaming hearse into the heart of their young charge's budding darkness. In EYE there can be no psychosexual kinks because all she wants to do is rescue her full-grown husband and bring him back to her tedious London social orbit. We just want to ride with the twins on their weird evil errands, but instead our camera follows Kerr everywhere, like a priest trying to score a fat donation: she lopes after Niven as he lurches hither and yon, as stricken by his impending doom as a bones-tossed Queequeg. She judges and condemns the wicked, wicked twins as they loiter in black turtlenecks; they drive poor Flora Robson to tears because... oh no, the nightmare--it's all happening again... Sign, Robson's always great, and if we can't run amok with the twins we'd be happy hanging around her for awhile, but noooo, on this endless bucolic French vacation we're stuck with the most boring character in a 60-km radius, and meanwhile all this cool stuff is going on behind our backs. She's like my mom used to be, forcing me to hide all my insidious soul-killing vices from her over the holidays because she doesn't understand why anyone would do anything bad for their health. And then wondering why I need to just sleep the day away and then stay up all night.. where she can't get me.
Luckily, the weird devil 'becoming'-ness I mentioned earlier is all over EYE: the music played during the local festival sounds eerily similar to Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" --we'd think it a homage or even rip-off had it not come first--and after that just imagine the film as a vision of what ROSEMARY'S BABY 2 might be like if Rosemary had twins and 18 years later she's still in denial about who their father was, chasing after them with mittens and rubbers as they burn churches and slaughter priests.
All that said, if not for Tate's real life fate lending EYE even more of the eerie black magic ballyhoo synchronicity that plagued ROSEMARY and THE EXORCIST, it would be worthless. But in its eerie prescience it's Tate's equivalent to James Dean's Highway Safety promo film. She's the bizarro super sexy Satanic Virgin Mary that would beget Rosemary Woodhouse and Regan MacNeil, as they in turn would beget a period of widespread Ouija abuse. And that black outfit with the hypnotic pendant or whatever is damn sexy, especially with her bright blonde hair as contrast. It shows us just how far ahead of us England was at celebrating the eerie self-confidence of badass babes in black (Mrs. Peel, we're needed) rather than ever trying to shoehorn them into pretty dresses and tie their hair back in a cruel mirthless bun.
Working our way back out of the EYE, it should be clear now that the devil is alive and well in any representation of his evil influence. His name is a kind of interactive tarot deck wherein having the cards read is what kills you. Believing precedes seeing; the moment your focus settles on a shadow, that shadow begins to spring to life, the way William Castle's rumor mill ballyhoo about mysterious accidents on set could be said to have indirectly led to the Manson murders.But... even then, man oh man -- there any more boring sacrificial murder weapon than a bow and arrow? Do British schoolchildren stay up at night listening to tales of the haunted archer? Nein! It's too impersonal. It lacks the fears we harbor for the knife. And another thing: if there's anything a drunk like me hates, it's a buzzkill. Everyone else wants whatever is going to happen to Niven to happen, including us. We didn't start watching a movie called EYE OF THE DEVIL so we could see Deborah Kerr scold us for our curiosity about such things. We're going to root for Sharon Tate, no matter what, evil or not, because she's gorgeous, young, and confident. And it doesn't take long before we're fully invested in whatever evil is going on, hoping the devil gets the job done before Kerr comes barging in like mom tromping down to the basement to complain about the noise you kids are making and what's that smell? Smoke? Let me see your eyes!
Mom, go back to bed!
 |
| If the devil's eye offends thee, Kerr, pluck it from its hottie roost! |
RIDE understands--the way few devil movies do--that the trick to defeating pure evil is not to confront it with pure good, but with balance, and a sense of humor to help you roll with the absurdity of it all, but not to the point you kill the atmosphere. That would be truly uncharitable.
INCUBUS.... the only film ever shot in Esperanto.... the language of the Satanic mass! Invented by the UN coven to bedevil the globe!
 |
| Put your feet up |
Second thought, scratch the other two, this would actually make a good double bill with the 1961 Liz-and-Dick semi-camp classic, THE SANDPIPER. Both concern a mythic 'impossible love' story between a paragon of virtue and a slutty mankiller who loves lolling in the Big Sur surf and spouting beatnik profundities. One is a studio-backed Vincente Minnelli opus, the other a low-budget concoction from Leslie "Ed Wood on a dime bag of Bergman" Stevens, but both love the Big Sur surf as much as we all do, if we've been there. And if we haven't been, what are we waiting for?
Sure, I know what your saying, man: INCUBUS sounds over-baked... but a succubus feeling sexually violated because Kirk brought her into a church to get out of the sun while she was asleep? Senpreza!
In conclusion, INCUBUS and EYE OF THE DEVIL share a lot more than their date. They're burdened by similar faults: EYE is way too dry and disdainful of its subject; INCUBUS is way too singleminded and didactic. Yet, they share a strength, too: a unique ambiguity about which 'side' they're on, as films. There's an association of good with boring and safe in both. In ROSEMARY'S BABY and THE EXORCIST, the heroines--Chris (Ellen Burstyn) and Rosemary (Mia Farrow) are hip enough that we don't wince at their every word, and the evil spirits--Pazuzu, Guy--vile enough that we don't want to go party with them. But in both these 1966 films, the 'average' voice, the establishment figure, so to speak, is an unshakable bore. He or She is as a fruit tree ripe for shaking. Every second of screen time they are not being shaken to the core is nigh unbearable to us, the hip post-67 viewer. Maybe it was still dangerous in 1966 to feel ourselves rooting for Tate and Hemmings in EYE. That we feared for their plan to be interrupted because of Kerr's imperialist meddling must have felt transgressive in that more innocent, staid era; and in INCUBUS not to spoil the ending, but did we really need to see some old church / patriarchy win out for 665th time against the feminine darkness? No one goes to a devil movie to root for the very thing they went to the movies to escape from, mom! Satano, liberigu miajn malbonajn junajn knabinojn!
1. William Castle got painful kidney stones right as the film was released - didn't you hear?
I just watched Bride of Satan, recorded from TCM a few nights ago, and at the end there was a short promo film of The Making Of Sharon Tate, Movie Star, that I could barely make it through. She is seen in a London discotheque dancing with David Hemming, doing screen tests, costuming, lots of photo shoots, with an English Newsreel narration. It's a promo for the movie, sure, but Wow. Just, Wow. It took me forever to watch Rosemary's Baby because of the various tinctured pains of the Dakota Building and Sharon Tate and the like. I finally watched it this Summer, after having sat on the Criterion blu ray for a couple of months. What a great movie it is! I like that if you went into it in 2013 with no knowledge at all being suspicious of John Cassavetes being a a rent boy at a lemon party behind his innocent bride's back. So I thought I was over my gut punches (my mother raised me thinking all movie stars were distant friends, so when Valley of the Dolls came on TV and she explained the LA Horrors it left me a bit shaken, even before the Mansons became common knowledge among teens). Seeing the short on Sharon Tate's Big Break Grooming Origin, just reconnected everything again. Everything is connected, and yes, God speaks to me through movies as well.
ReplyDeleteSharon and Roman were married in Jan 1968. Check your facts...to even suggest that what happened on August 9th, 1969 is connected to fictional drivel is beyond the pale. Oh and Roman and Sharon actually 🙄 met during the Fealess Vampire Killers he did not get her the role in EOD...she was already under contract with Marty Ransohoff, whom Roman knew from FVK as Marty was involved with that production also. Have some respect.
ReplyDeleteIf you have a personal connection to them, I do apologize. I'm speaking purely of mythic archetypal linkages, the realms where dreams, Satan, the collective and personal subconscious, and William Castle-brand ballyhoo -- connect. Reality has nothing to do with legend, and myth is truer than reality (if you're slightly insane, whom this blog caters to).
Delete