31 Days of Horror Reviews: Prince of Darkness

Day 18: Prince of Darkness (1987), dir. John Carpenter

Streaming Availability: Peacock

"You will not be saved by the Holy Ghost. You will not be saved by the god Plutonium."

Prince of Darkness has a lot more ambition than your average scary ghoul movie. It sets out to syncretize theoretical physics with Christian dualism. Please pay attention, there's a lot of set-up here.

This movie imagines that God actually is playing dice (sorry, Einstein). A force, best defined as the Godhead, is controlling every particle on the quantum realm. There is also an evil force, Satan, who is not the chief demon, but rather the son of an Anti-God. The Anti-God is a force of destruction living in an alternate reality of pure antimatter. One of the big questions of modern physics is why there is so little antimatter in our universe, and here's your answer: God did it. Back to Satan, he's not a red guy with horns, instead he's a sentient green liquid in a jar in the basement of a spooky church in Los Angeles. But he still can possess people for his terrible plan to open the door to the Anti-God, destroying our world.

Got all that? I almost wish it had even more detail. Maybe John the Baptist is really the Higgs Boson.

John Carpenter directed and wrote the script for Prince of Darkness, screenplay credit going to a a pseudonym, "Martin Quatermass". That's a reference to Professor Bernard Quatermass, a recurring British scientist character from the Fifties and Sixties, who fought against cosmic horror nightmares like we have today. I really love Quatermass and the Pit from 1967, huge recommendation. In today's movie, there is no perfect analogue for Prof. Quatermass, nobody is truly a hero of stiff-upper-lip rationalism. We have two lead scientists, Professor Birack (Victor Wong) and an unnamed physicist Catholic priest played by Donald Pleasence. (The subtitles calls him "Father Loomis", which is a play on the Halloween character - that name is not corroborated anywhere in the credits.) Anyway, our older gentlemen leaders are brilliant men with solid insights who build off each other's ideas. But they are not the heroes this moment calls for. They cower in fear for most of the movie.

Nobody's moral code or science saves the world in Prince of Darkness. Goodness triumphs only thanks to a brave tackle. The whole cast is easily an hour behind Satan's plan. They are just realizing there even is a Satan before most of them are possessed and all exits are patrolled killer zombie homeless people. Things get bad, get worse, keep getting worse, and the day is saved by what can only be called a total lucky fluke.

Prince of Darkness is about a group of researchers and graduate students at USC gathering for a weekend to study an old church in a dismal part of LA. This abandoned building had been controlled by a society called the 'Brotherhood of Sleep', an order so powerful and secret that even the Vatican was unaware of them. Their task had been to guard ancient texts and the cylinder of green liquid that is Satan, but now they've collapsed, and Satan is ready to play. While the scientists dig through a lot of technobabble on their readings, the texts are deciphered. This reveals that Jesus was an alien, and the Church murdered him for trying to tell the story of the Satan Jar. That might have helped right now, when Lucifer's slaves are spitting juice down people's throats, destroying their free will.

There is not much of a lead to Prince of Darkness. Brian (Jameson Parker) is the most prominent "action"-y character. If Kurt Russell were in this movie, this is the character he'd play. But Carpenter's more famous SciFi horror film, The Thing is not really a star vehicle either as much as an ensemble piece of various near-strangers doing a job that goes badly. That's more the vibe here too. Brian is dating and sleeping with Catherine (Lisa Blount) but their relationship is thorny and awkward. Most of the characters are nerds or technicians who look the part. You'll never be able to keep track of everybody, even the characters easily loose track of each other. You do get a self-appointed "comic relief" in Walter (Dennis Dun), whose antics are actively annoying to everybody, possessed or otherwise. He's not funny, I don't think he's meant to be funny. He's just having a bad night and cannot help himself any other way.

Since Satan is green slime that drips upwards, he's not going to be a compelling villain. We have kind of ensemble villainy too. The church is quickly surrounded by an army of unmoving homeless people covered in insects. (Carpenter's worst instinct is turning social problems into mindless hordes: homeless people here, minority gangs in Assault on Precinct 13.) The chief zombie is a character the credits call "Street Schizo" played by shock rocker Alice Cooper. The lead possessed person is a scientist named Susan (Anne Howard). Eventually Satan finds a "chosen one" of sorts, Kelly (Susan Blanchard), whose transformation is some of the most unpleasant body horror of the Eighties.

Kelly has to suck in all of the green shit into her eyes and mouth, and then spends the better part of a day "becoming". At first she grows a massive stomach as if grotesquely pregnant, while her body absorbs the invader. The results is a nightmare somewhere between radiation burns and AIDS anxieties. Her flesh just melts away into lesions. I'm leaning more on the AIDS metaphor, since Kelly's first symptom is an unexplained dark bruise. Whatever it is, it is really gross, and Prince of Darkness is a gross movie already. One guy melts away into bugs.

Yes, the content of Prince of Darkness is objectively horrifying. One guy stabs himself in the throat while loudly singing 'Amazing Grace', then spends the rest of his time possessed laughing and weeping at his own reflection. But beyond just recounting the horror, there's something else here. There's something really strange about the entire production.  The fact Carpenter filmed the whole movie in thirty days in real locations with relatively unknown actors gives it a guerilla quality. We get footage shot from the future projected via tachyon into dreams (again, weird movie) that filmed off a television playing a distorted VHS tape. But the whole movie is sorta dusty. Prince of Darkness just does not look like a movie from 1987, it is unsettling. There's very little color, no fashion-sense, no movie stars, just people in drab clothes having a very bad night.

Or maybe the confusing timelessness comes from Jameson Parker's big bushy Ned Flanders mustache. That awful thing does not belong in any year.

For some reason Prince of Darkness has ended up in the territory of being one of Carpenter's "minor works". This is the second film in Carpenter's informal "Apocalypse Trilogy" and the least-seen. Everybody loves The Thing and In the Mouth of Madness has a solid cult audience, while not many people are celebrating Prince of Darkness. I can understand why. This is a terrifying movie but it is not a fun movie. There are few characters you can cheer for like a Kurt Russell. There are no big Wilford Brimley or Jürgen Prochnow performance to ham things up. Scary things happen but in slow, methodical, almost clinical ways. It is unrelenting in its disturbing qualities.

I recommend Prince of Darkness fully, this is a great movie, it might just be the scariest Carpenter film.

Next Time! Louis Cypher? There's nothing suspicious about that name! Let's get sweaty with Angel Heart.

31 Days of Horror Reviews: Hellbound: Hellraiser II

Day 17: Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988), dir. Tony Randel

Streaming Availability: Tubi

Hellraiser II is not directed by Clive Barker, but it well-imitates his style. He was writer and producer, and helped keep it well within the lines drawn by Hellraiser 1. We keep the same gray, vague, Transatlantic atmosphere of being America but not America. New director Tony Randel is solid at just doing what Barker did. Most of the core cast returns, whether living, dead, or in-between. We also get an expansion of the lore of the Cenobites and their world, most of which would never be remembered by the sequels.

Needless to say, Clive Barker would never again have any real say in the franchise. As far as I'm concerned, Hellbound the end of Hellraiser. By Hellraiser III, we are fully in the Pinhead series. You got Cenobites Taking Manhattan. They're at war with the NYPD, one of them shoots CDs, it's very stupid, it is fun... but it isn't really Hellraiser anymore. It's just demons in Clive Barker's art style doing silly mischief.

The real problem with the Hellraiser/Pinhead franchise is that everybody misunderstood the strength of these first two movies. Doug Bradley as Pinhead is an icon, he's great on the mic delivering lines like "Your suffering will be legendary, even in hell!". I get it, I love Pinhead too. I can do a half-decent impression, it's fun. But the real villain of Hellraiser, the real star, was never one of the Cenobites, it was Clare Higgins as Julia, the step-mother driven by lust towards nastiness. She gets top billing in Hellraiser II, for good reason. She's better in this movie than she was in the first. They let her put her hair down and she can really chew scenery as a smirking prophetess of doom. Much of Hellraiser II is setting her up for bigger things which never happen.

We pick up right where the first movie ended. After the police found the Cotton family home full of corpses and maggots, they arrest the lone survivor, Kirsty (Ashley Laurence). Kirsty's stories about puzzle boxes and demonic dimensions land her right into a mental asylum commanded by a sadist, Dr. Channard (Kenneth Cranham). Channard has been seeking evil for decades, so is easily seduced by a reborn skinless Julia (body-doubled by Deborah Joel). After Julia has drunk her full of a few asylum inmates and gotten her skin back, she can deliver lines like "They've changed the rules of the fairy tale. I'm no longer just the wicked step-mother, now I'm the Evil Queen". Chills, man. 

Then the entire cast goes down to Hell and things both get simultaneously interesting and also completely fall apart.

We've had plenty of movies about things from Hell coming to Earth, but all month we have never gone down there ourselves. Stories about visiting the underworld are ancient and very common, everybody from Jesus to Ishtar to Dante have done it, and along the way you get to meet a whose-who of demonic entities. The underworld had evolved a lot the course of Abrahamic imagination: at first it was a gloomy place of quiet emptiness and later became a fiery inferno of suffering. But Hellraiser II has stranger geometries at mind: Hell is an endless labyrinth of stone corridors. And at the center is a god, a giant octahedron radiating darkness that Julia tells us is "Leviathan". (Named for the kaiju-sized sea serpent God is very proud to be able to slay in the Book of Job, not that such boasts really are any help to Job with the, you know, dead family stuff.) 

Here is where we see the true extent of Barker's cosmology. This is a universe centered around an unknowable and bizarre entity whose only method of communicating with us is to transform our bodies into nightmarish sex ghouls. The transformation is horrible but also liberation, your true self brought out. "...And to think, I hesitated" says a born again Channard.

That however leads to one of the problems with Hellraiser II. Who is the villain here? Hellraiser 1 is not ambiguous that the real villain is Uncle Frank (Sean Chapman). The sequel though has about four candidates. There's Julia herself who sets off the entire events of this movie. There's Doctor Channard, now a Super-Cenobite - apparently more powerful than the others with his silly tentacle hands. Pinhead and his cohorts have to job for this new threat, and are all easily defeated. (The crowd is not pleased, boo-birds are flying.) Oh and Frank is back for one scene. The various possible villains all bounce into each other while Kirsty and her silent, possibly autistic companion, Tiffany (Imogen Boorman), wander through Hell.

Kirsty really has nothing to do and this reveals one of the key problems of Hellraiser 1 and 2, even as I love these movies. Why is Kirsty here? Pinhead keeps saying that Kirsty wants to play, implying she truly desires what is befalling her, but we get no sense of that. Julia is the one who is lured into the eroticism of Hell. Kirsty just wants to date mediocre men that somehow all look like Paul Reiser in Aliens. Ashley Laurence's performance does not give any sense that she wants any part of this except to scream. Meanwhile, Julia has never been more herself than she is in Hellraiser II. I'd love to see what was next, except she basically trips and falls down a pit, and thus leaves the franchise forever.

I'm not sure that giving the Cenobites a backstory was a good idea. Turns out they're all humans once, and who cares? Doug Bradley is impressive in the costume but out of it, turns out he's just a short bald English guy. (There's a good reason we never got to see David Prowse's face when he played Darth Vader.) This is the one bit of mythology the sequels kept, for whatever reason. It is diminishing, all the mystery is gone.

Hellraiser II is only ten minutes longer than the original but it feels much flabbier. I like a lot of things in this movie, but I'll admit, there are issues. It feels like there were two or three scripts are badly sewn together, there's one too many characters. Still, I cannot say enough good about Clare Higgins. Julia's big murder scenes are some of the nastiest in the series, it's remarkable how long they are. This is a grosser, more extreme movie than the first, if you can believe that. They even get away with showing a few shots that the censors made them remove from Hellraiser 1. But it still remains less scary.

If you're actually interested in the ideas Barker brought out about a kind of demonic religion of pleasure: this is it, it ends with Hellraiser II. "Leviathan" might get a shout-out in the script, that's it. Both Barker and Clare Higgins refused to return for Hellraiser III, and that was that.

You know the rest the story already. Two more sequels went to theaters, I reviewed one of them in 2021. The rest were all straight to video and mostly are bad. Some are embarrassingly cheap movies made just to keep the rights. Hellraiser is not getting better any time soon either. David Bruckner talked a good game about being "truer" to the Barker vision for his 2022 reboot, and then made just another slasher movie - a really bad one too. He clearly had no interest in Hellraiser either as a metaphor for sexuality or as a spooky vision of Christianity. There's a female Pinhead in that one and nobody does anything horny with the idea. Come on!

It's a shame.

Next Time! Can we top the Devil as a giant geometrical figure in terms of abstraction? How about if Satan was a jar of green radioactive slime? Check that out in John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness.

31 Days of Horror Reviews: Hellraiser

Day 16: Hellraiser (1987), dir. Clive Barker

Streaming Availability: Tubi

"What's your pleasure, sir?"

I don't know how you all got into horror, but my pathway in was the video store. This makes me officially Old; talking about physical media is a confession of having lived through Flintstonian technology levels in 2023. But video stores were cool, even if you were just window-shopping for films. Horror always stood out, and not just for the awesome cover art. Horror was a genre of franchise. These stories were not one-offs, they were sagas, they were mythology, they had long complicated histories which you could follow as the sequel numbers ballooned ever higher. Friday the 13th had two different movies claiming to be the final one, how could that work? 

Of all the franchises though, one always stood out as particularly scary to me. Freddy, Jason, and Michael would give you nightmares but you know what those movies were. Pinhead though, that was "not for me". I did know why he had nails in his head, I did not want to know why. He was just killing teenagers. This looked depraved and nasty in ways I was not ready for. It was forbidden knowledge even in the spooky section. I thought these movies should be put back behind the beaded curtain, beyond the further regions of experience.

As an adult now, it is depressing that Hellraiser became the "Pinhead franchise", that I could even put it in conversation with the Chucky movie. The fact you call the guy 'Pinhead' feels like a ridiculous diminishment of the mystery and power at play here. I'm not sure if he's ever called that in any of the movies. His actor, Doug Bradley does not seem to mind. He got regular work in eight movies, and he kept up the performance all through it, putting in work while productions around him turned into trash. But in those first two Hellraiser movies, there was more going for more than just "let's kill some idiots with vaguely Satanic, mildly kink overtones". The first movies are surreal, sensual, and dangerous. Nothing branded "Hellraiser", not even the terrible reboot from last year, has gotten anywhere near that again.

One of the very cool thing about the first Hellraiser is how this is everybody's first movie. Clive Barker had never directed a feature film before, so was very fortunate to be able to adapt his own novella, The Hellbound Heart. (Compare Hellraiser to a Barker adaptation he didn't work on, 1986's Rawhead Rex, a goofy monster movie, and the contrast could rip your head off from whiplash.) The cast is mostly newbies too. Ashley Laurence was given an "And Introducing" credit for playing the protagonist, Kirsty. But this was also Doug Bradley's first movie. Clare Higgins had only been in one other movie before, here playing the other major perspective character, Kirsty's withdrawn, sexually-imposing step-mother, Julia. Of the core cast, only Andrew Robinson as Kirsty's father, Larry, had much of a resume. It's a great cast too. Andrew Robinson winds up playing two roles after a Face/Off skin change, and he's great in both of them. Higgins, though, I think is a stand-out, I'll have more to say about her tomorrow. 

Even as a rookie, Barker was a great director, it's a shame he's made so few movies. Hellraiser is even a nice efficient movie, 85 minutes. Impressive for how much is in it.

We previously have only dealt with a dualist reality of good versus evil. But what if neither really existed? What if we imagined them both? Maybe our reality was just a tiny blip in a see of infinite terror? Hellraiser is our dip into a new kind of conception of the shape of the gods and devils, how they fit into an inter-dimensional horror realm. Cosmic horror was common in pulp circles going back through the 20th century. H.P. Lovecraft was so important to this genre that his name has become an adjective defining the entire concept. The 1960s had a few dips into this world with Roger Corman films (X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes) and Hammer Horror (Quatermass and the Pit), but it is really in the Eighties that this blows up with movies like From Beyond, Lifeforce, and the Phantasm franchise, and also Stephen King is hugely into this stuff.

Barker, unlike Lovecraft, actually imagines a world with something like a rational order. It can be defined and explained, just you will probably not enjoy it. All of existence is not bent towards what morality or faith: the gods instead demand pleasure. The central villains of this franchise, the cenobites are associated with Hell, are they demons at all? They dress as a sadomasochist priests in a leather cassock. "Cenobite" is an archaic word meaning "one whose lives in a monastic community" - though it will never hold that definition ever again, this franchise has ruined it forever. The Lead Cenobite, who everybody calls Pinhead so I'll do the same (...sigh) describes his kind as "demons to some, angels to others". This is a path towards a salvation of a kind. Of course, I need to mention that Clive Barker is gay and that shapes his fiction. Particularly you can see it in his characters' search for forbidden pleasure outside a conservative normality. I'm not that the cenobites are all that evil in this first Hellraiser movie, just they are very insistent that you do not refuse their gifts.

The ones who are evil are the wicked step-mother, Julia, and her lover, Uncle Frank (Sean Chapman). Frank has escaped a realm we would only recognize as "hell", reborn as a skinless horror (body-doubled by Oliver Smith) in the attic of his brother's house. Julia is unsatisfied by Larry and craves the adventure and danger of Frank, as Frank himself craved to explore outer realities of eroticism using a haunted Puzzle Box. Frank needs blood and bodies to regenerate his flesh, Imhotep style, so Julia lures men upstairs to be meals. Young innocent, Kirsty, however, has found the Puzzle Box, and makes a deal with the Cenobites: she'll go free if they take Frank in her stead. Pinhead says "...maybe".

A few odd details about Hellraiser: it is really unclear where this is taking place. No region of America is this gray and gloomy outside of maybe Seattle. Giving one extra a Yankee baseball cap is not fooling anybody, Clive, this was clearly filmed in England. A few actors are actually dubbed over with American accents, including Kirsty's boyfriend, Steve (Robert Hines). I really like the design of the old house that is the setting for most of this movie. It seems to be 90% staircase, there are no hallways, everything is set on that one central spire with dim light floating in from the stained glass windows. 

Physical locations and sets aside, I love the art design here and the special effects. Frank's reincarnation scene is one of the most amazing works of effects ever. The make-up design on the monsters are incredible. Who could not love the chattering Cenobite? He's adorable. Doug Bradley is instantly iconic, his deep voice is so imposing and commanding. "This isn't for your eyes!" I don't know why there is a bone dragon at the end of this movie, but it looked cool. I do not know why whenever the Cenobites appear the soundtrack adds awful moaning and big pillars covered in gore appear from nowhere. It's terrifying. Uncle Frank's death is one of the great kills in horror cinema. 

"JESUS WEPT!", indeed he did. This is not a world where Jesus belongs. Satan does not belong here either. Whatever is happening in Hellraiser is so much more horrible and alluring than anything Christianity or Anti-Christianity can offer.

Next Time! Well, we gotta do the sequel, don't we? I have so much more to say about these movies with Hellbound: Hellraiser II.

31 Days of Horror Reviews: The Visitor (1979)

Day 15: The Visitor (1979), dir. Guilio Paradisi

Streaming Availability: Youtube

...Oh man, where do I even begin with a movie like this?

In 1974, Ovidio G. Assonitis directed a movie called Beyond the Door - we've already discussed it. It was a mixture of a Rosemary's Baby plot with scares stolen from The Exorcist. However, Assonitis was not done with surreal takes on Hollywood devil films. Five years later he returned to that same place with The Visitor, now as producer. (Though I should mention, Assonitis was notorious for secretly doing both jobs, James Cameron has some stories from his time making Piranha II: The Spawning.) Between '74 and '79, something enormous had happened that changed world history forever. That was, of course, the release of George Lucas' Star Wars. Everybody wanted to make a SciFi movie now, even guys still trying to make Exorcist rip-offs half a decade later.

The only issue is that all these devil movies are in some way or another Biblical. How do you fit space ships and lasers into stories about God and Christ? Well, as it turns out, the Seventies were a perfect time for this. UFO occultism was at a high point. (Also, no, I do not think there is much difference between 20th century aliens and earlier magic esotericism.) Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods? would be a decade old by the time The Visitor was made, creating the Ancient Aliens pseudoscience. The old gods were dead after the tumult of the Sixties, maybe we needed creators riding flying saucer now. Also, the Seventies were a high point for telekinesis ideas, a new form of magic. Finally, we just around the corner from a big rise in cosmic horror in the Eighties. Phantasm, also in 1979, would have scenes in an alternate desert dimension, so why not The Visitor too?

Basically The Visitor is a movie that only could have been released in 1979. And I don't think it made sense to people in 1979 either.

The Visitor is not about rewriting our history to replace J.C. with E.T., rather it just puts God and Satan on spaceships. The mythology is explained to us by an enigmatic blonde-haired blue-eyed Jesus (Franco Nero) sitting in a white room with a collection of bald children disciples. If this sounds like incredible imagery, get ready, more is coming. Many thousands of years ago, in space, two characters named Zatteen and Yahweh did battle. Zatteen was defeated and imprisoned, but escaped to Earth. His powerful psychic powers passed into the human genome, still arising every so often with in scary children with TK powers. An old man in a safari suit (none other than director John Huston!) walks into the room with Christ, announcing that one of Zatteen's descendants has been found, and it is a little girl in Atlanta, Katy Collins (Paige Conner).

This mythology is interesting for a couple reasons. Obviously Zatteen is Satan and Yahweh is... well, Yahweh, the Canaanite storm god that would one day become capital-G God. There's a taboo in Judaism against saying God's real name, I don't think he'll mind today if I'm talking about the characters in this movie. (Lord, you may strike me down if you disagree.) This story of Satan escaping heaven/outer space is stands out though, because it sounds alike like the myth of the Grigori, the Watchers. That's an entirely different story of fallen angels from the more famous Lucifer. These would be characters from the non-canonical Book of Enoch who mated with human women and sired a race of giants, the Nephilim. There's a lot of cool, weird stuff in Biblical apocrypha, and The Visitor is a cool, weird movie.

Neither Zatteen or Yahweh appear in person. Zatteen plans to be reborn through the son of a woman named Barbara (Joanne Nail), Paige's mother, all in an elaborate eugenics program. Imagine an Antichrist Kwisatz Haderach. John Huston is never explicitly called "Yahweh", and it is unclear if he is God at all. He goes by the name of "Jerzy Colsowicz" (note the initials). But I love the idea that the director Key Largo and The Treasure of Sierra Madre might be God himself in The Visitor.

A lot is going on in this film. We have an evil little girl with psychic powers who can make Kareem Abdul-Jabbar explode. There's John Huston wandering around the streets of Atlanta while a jazzy soundtrack written by Franco Micalizzi fires an exploding horn section all around him with loud crescendo after crescendo. Lance Henriksen, still serving Satan after his role in Omen II, is playing Barbara's boyfriend and Katy's adopted father. He mostly spends the movie attending sinister meetings in Southern mansions. He sold his soul to own the Atlanta Hawks, and I think Zatteen screwed him. The goal is to get Barbara pregnant, but she values her sexual independence and will not be a part of it.

The Visitor is Italian so you expect strangeness. Thing is, it is not always weird in Italian ways. The sound was recorded on set, the cast is fantastic, all American. Old trophies of Hollywood like Shelley Winters, Glenn Ford and Mel Ferrer are side characters. Sam Peckinpah is in here. Even the two relatively unknown actresses at the heart of the movie, Paige Conner and Joanne Nail, are very good. Things get very Italian once one of Katy's birthday presents magically becomes a gun and she paralyzes her mother with a bullet through the spine. Or when a demon hawk flies around picking out Glenn Ford's eyes. A dues ex machina by way of John Huston ends the movie with an army of doves coming down through a Close Encounters of the Third Kind light show. Also John Huston plays Pong.

It is a trip.

This is a really great-looking movie too. The Visitor photographs an amazing collection of these ultra-modernist spaces in Atlanta, including the Hawks' old arena, the Omni. This was decades before Atlanta became anything like the center of Hollywood that is now. The cinematography is remarkable and experimental at times. There's a lot of symmetry in the shots, there's a lot of shots filmed from up and above characters peering through fences or lattices. A UFO-like abduction staged on a dark-road with a truck that is absolutely terrifying. I love the edit too. They accomplish a lot by having a montage of Barbara barely surviving her gunshot while Katy happily does a gymnastics routine. You can do a lot of storytelling and character work without dialog.

This is a bizarre movie but I think The Visitor is a great movie. It is very strange, it is unique in a dozen ways, and it is very cool. It's even a remarkably feminist movie. Barbara gets really badly abused over and over in The Visitor but loses never strength. After her abduction she is made to be pregnant with the Antichrist, and she just aborts it. Simple as that. Nobody is all that worried. God is in this movie and he's okay with it. I think the pro-choice argument is done better in The Visitor than in Beyond the Door, in that it is not an argument at all, simply a part of life. Yahweh is a lot wiser here than his disciples on my Earth make him out to be.

Next Time! This is the start of a little unit in our series about SciFi takes on demons. Where better to go than Hellraiser?

31 Days of Horror Reviews: Alucarda

Day 14: Alucarda (1977), dir. Juan López Moctezuma

Streaming Availability: N/A

We cold open on a dying woman giving birth to a daughter in a barn. The movie is not clear who this woman is but I can tell you: this is Lucy Westenra. Yeah, that Lucy, sometimes named after the Peanuts character, the ever-doomed best friend of Mina Harker. She's just as doomed here in this film, dying before the opening credits start. Her daughter is Alucarda, the bastard child of Count Dracula. That girl is going to grow to be part vampire, part demon, part Stephen King & Brian de Palma's Carrie. Classic gothic horror, demon horror, and modern SciFi telekinetic horror all merge together in Alucarda, our first queer genre film of the month.

Alucarda is one many nunsploitation movies released in the Seventies in the wake of The Devils. There were plenty to choose from, including other Mexican options. Satánico Pandemonium from 1975 had a very good title. Alucarda felt the most in conversation with the films we've been working with so far. This is still a filthy exploitation film full of nudity and kink; base pleasures for male gaze are the primary goals. Yet Alucarda is also a very interesting movie. This is our first film a majority-Catholic country, and despite that, is bitterly anti-clerical. This is a movie where Satan is not causing any trouble, just having harmless orgies, and in response, the forces of order have a violent terrifying response. A loving lesbian relationship between two nuns is torn apart by barbarous authorities, whose exorcism practices are backwards nonsense.

A lot of our movies have vacillated between being pro and anti-devil, Alucarda is maybe the most ambiguous. It sure does not like the Church, but is anybody that much better? Yeah, the awful priest (David Silva) struck first, but when it comes time for darkness to strike back, a lot of people end up screaming and on fire. In the end, good "triumphs", only with most of the cast in ashes. The local doctor, Dr. Oszek (Claudio Brook), at first demands that the exorcism rituals stop, declaring "this is not the fifteenth century!" (Not that you can tell in Alucarda, every set is made to look medieval.) But by the end, Oszek is tossing holy water with everybody else, following Father Karras' footsteps in The Exorcist down towards the irrational and mystical. Science loses, Satan loses, the big statue of Jesus is on fire, did anybody win?

There's some interesting double-casting happening here. I'm not sure this is symbolic or simply a result of Alucarda being a cheap movie. Claudio Brook also plays a character credited as "Hunchbacked [slur word for Romani people]", who may in fact be Satan himself. He is a mysterious stranger living in the forest who leads the main couple into darkness. The title character, Alucarda has to share her actress Tina Romero with Lucy. Alucarda is libertine nun that falls in love with Justine (Susana Kamini), a new initiate, who is easily seduced into queerer worlds than the convent. The Hunchback directs the first lesbian contact as both girls slice their breasts to drink the blood.

Again, vampirism is a metaphor for homosexuality. We saw this so often last year when we did 31 vampire movies.

This would probably be more liberatory if not for the man in the room, sort of confirming the movie's target audience. "Don't worry, fellas, this is for you." Also I should note these characters are supposed to be fifteen (the actresses were in their twenties), which apparently was less disgusting in the Seventies. Or maybe Alucarda wanted it that way, this is gross movie for perverts after all, and it is proud of it.

There seems to be very true holy power at work in Alucarda. Most of god's work is shown as sadistic fetishes: whipping, hanging naked girls up on crosses, very realistically drawing blood from their abdomens. (For perverts, I said.) The exorcism in this film is so unsuccessful it actually kills Justine. Meanwhile, evil is very alive. We see everybody's favorite goat-faced demon, Baphomet at the Satanic orgy. If God is helpless, Alucarda meanwhile can turn corpses into vampires and can combust the living by reciting the names of classic demons. Holy water does work, maybe only because the movie starts operating on the genre rules of vampire films.

Alucarda is cheap but not artless. It cannot compete with the scale and feverishly artistry that Ken Russell employed in 1971. However, this movie has plenty of energy. Most of the convent is screaming through most of the film, either from demons, whips, or flames. It is the kind of movie that will make your roommates concerned about you and the noises they're hearing from the living room. Some of the art design is interesting: the church is set in a cave full of candles. Catholicism is made into an ancient superstition outside civilization. I also really like Vampire Justine when she emerges out of a coffin filled to the brim with blood. That's a fantastic image. Hokey acting and sleazy goals cannot destroy what is a decent horror movie in Alucarda.

Next Time! Lance Henriksen is given the Atlanta Hawks in exchange for siring the Antichrist in The Visitor.