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The pact was signed eighteen years ago
To the Devil a Daughter (1976) may not be a great movie, but for more than ten years I have wanted to watch it again for the sake of one scene and I regret nothing about doing exactly that.
Gratifyingly, it turns out that much more of the film is worth revisiting than I had remembered. Until it whiffs the ending so badly that to call it a damp squib would be an insult to fireworks of all weathers, it's more than just a placeholder in the cycle of occult thrillers that crowded the 1970's; it takes the familiar tesserae of skepticism and diablerie and apocalypse and nudity and at its best gets something chilly, grimy, and genuinely weird out of them, relying on audience intuition over onscreen explanation to pull off a surprisingly successful ratio of suggestion to blood-splattered sex magick. I suspect it helps that the premise is right there in the title. Words like black magic and Satanism don't enter the script until well into the second act, but by then the characters are merely acknowledging out loud what the audience has sensed since the stained-glass fall of the credits under which the iron-black unbending figure of Father Michael Rayner (Christopher Lee) endured his own excommunication in defiant silence: "It is not heresy and I will not recant!" We hear the ambiguity in the name of the "Children of the Lord" even before their ritual practices confirm that they recognize quite a different savior than their contemplative Catholic trappings suggest. When the name of Astaroth is finally spoken, it simply answers the question of which demon. What's concealed from us are the human details, what's behind the nervous ingratiation of Henry Beddows (Denholm Elliott), how seriously world-weary writer John Verney (Richard Widmark) takes the source material of his popular novels of the occult, how much the sheltered nun Catherine Beddows (Natassja Kinski) understands of the "great destiny" for which she has been retrieved from her Bavarian convent just in time for her eighteenth birthday on All Hallows' Eve. And while we may guess with reasonable accuracy at that destiny's general lineaments, we can't be confident until late in the sometimes dreamily oblique, sometimes bluntly messy game how it is to be achieved and how it might be thwarted, if it even can. It is remarkably relaxing to watch a horror film and not once want to scream at the characters for refusing to admit the kind of story they are obviously in. It frees up the tension for other, more interesting things.
Not having read the 1953 novel by Dennis Wheatley which John Peacock, Christopher Wicking, and an uncredited Gerald Vaughan-Hughes adapted into the next-to-last film theatrically released by Hammer Film Productions until the studio's revival in 2008, I don't know who to blame for the shortcomings in this admirably restrained approach to a plot which features, let's face it, two sacrificial childbirths, a protective circle drawn in a suicide's blood, a spontaneous combustion, a murder with a steel comb, a vision of the blood-slicked earthly form of an infant demon crawling from its incubator into the womb of the woman intended as its adult avatar, and a fleeting but full-frontal nude scene by an actress who was fourteen at the time of filming, which I found out after the fact. It is nicely symmetrical to furnish the protagonist and antagonist each with a pair of seconds, leaving Catherine as the point of contention and her weak-willed father as the wild card between them, but despite the embarrassment of talent contained in Honor Blackman, Anthony Valentine, Michael Goodliffe, and Eva Maria Meineke, neither the literary agent and her partner who deals in contemporary art nor the married couple of unblinkingly devout medical professionals register more than occasionally as characters as opposed to well-photographed devices. Catherine herself is nearly a cipher, which is fine if she's meant to have been raised deliberately vacant, a vessel to be filled with Astaroth, and not so fine if the film actually wants her to feel some ambivalence about this fate. There are hints of the latter—one minute she's passionately protesting to a revolted Verney, "Lord Astaroth . . . is good! I want to do good for the world, to serve my Lord!" and the next remembering, like an out-of-body experience or a drugged nightmare, an orgiastic ritual in which she was mock-mounted by the golden effigy of Astaroth in the same measured rhythm with which a gold-masked Father Michael copulated for real with an identically masked woman (Izabella Telezynska) as dark-haired and white-robed as Catherine herself. "I am Catherine!" she comes out of the memory crying, struggling and lashing out, "Catherine is mine!" as if she is both the girl desperately claiming her own reality and the devouring fiend to whom she was consecrated at birth in her dead mother's blood. "It was Margaret, but it was me! His spirit filled me!" She does not make it sound like an annunciation. Bred to it or not, she may well have some qualms about letting Astaroth inside her again. But she spends so much of the rest of the picture entranced or otherwise under the influence of Father Michael that when he warns at the crucial moment, "Everything she does now must be of her own free will," it feels like an empty formality. If she goes consenting to the Devil, it should be either triumphant or tragic, and here I'm not even sure it happened at all. Even Verney feels fuzzier around the edges than a man should whose professional fictions have suddenly become all too lethally real. He's not a strawman skeptic, explaining early on that "ninety-eight percent of so-called Satanists are nothing but pathetic freaks who get their kicks out of dancing naked in freezing churchyards. They use the Devil as an excuse for getting some sex. But then there's that other two percent. I'm not so sure about them." By the next morning, grimly and correctly, he's decided: "I have the feeling I'm dealing with the other two percent." But if this development perturbs his belief system, if it confirms it, if he has any faith of his own to draw on or if he's operating strictly by the rules of his research and if it makes a difference either way, we never get a clue; what we mostly learn about Verney is that he approaches his demonslaying with as much irritation as gravity, as though he'd much rather be dealing with the skyclad weirdos. It's a relatable attitude to be sure, but it leaves something of a lacuna in the film's metaphysics. Lastly, there is the unfair and unavoidable fact that Tanith Lee's "Malice in Saffron" (The Book of the Damned, 1988) is the single best story I have ever encountered about Satanist nuns and nothing in this movie matches its protagonist's revelation of the Angel Esrafel: "It came to her that she underwent a vision, a religious experience of Hell, but no less holy for being profane."
And yet I can forgive the movie all of these flaws because I love its magic, which is hardly ever called by that name. Almost none of it is done with special effects, unless you count theatrical lighting and a fisheye lens; all of it benefits from the wide-angle portraiture photography of David Watkin and the sympathetic editing of John Trumper in which ritual and reaction are intercut so naturally that no explanations are needed to convince the viewer of the lines of correspondence—spooky action at a distance. When the fruit of that less than immaculate conception comes to term, its birth is attended by the toys and stuffed animals of Catherine's childhood. She wails and thrashes in her sleep that night as if her body's the one bound in white silk vestments and racked with labor, but the next morning recalls uneasily, "I dreamt I was being born." Mirrors have always worked as doors and windows, but these days a poseable plastic doll can be just as effective a poppet as anything pinched out of wax. One especially striking sequence finds Father Michael seated with George and Eveline de Grasse (Goodliffe and Meineke) at a table marked with astrological signs and a pentagram around whose points are laid half a dozen golden dishes, each painted inside with a curious, half-classical image. One looks like a satyr, another a pointing hand, another resembles Éliphas Lévi's Baphomet. All begin face down and are turned up like Tarot cards as we watch. It is done in silence, unshowily. It gets results. At one point, a photograph of a younger Henry Beddows is seen lying across one of the dishes as if carelessly tossed there, and it can't mean anything good. When Father Michael called to remind him of his loyalties, a piece of plain rope wound around the priest's receiver became an adder coiling up the would-be recusant's arm. Any law of similarity can go both ways, of course—a slap across the face of spellbound Catherine doesn't just snap her out of it, it rocks Father Michael as if he'd taken the blow himself. The possibility of just this kind of occult aiki is one of the few elements of the climax that doesn't feel like it was spitballed on the spot and shot with the last film in the camera. Lee is magnificent in all of these scenes, I should mention, playing his role as self-appointed priest and prophet of Astaroth with all the pride expected of the Devil's emissary on earth but also the calmness of great conviction, as if he truly believes that earthing a demon of the first hierarchy in the body of an eighteen-year-old girl is the only way to "renew the vital spirit of the world." He has nothing but scorn for cringing Beddows who was never a true believer, but he's so tender with the women who give their lives for the cause that we don't doubt that if he were required to slit his own throat for the baptismal blood, we wouldn't find a hesitation mark on him afterward. He even pulls off a contrast during the birth scene that could have played like pure Charles Addams, Eveline shocked, George sickened, Father Michael smiling joyously. If the part was Lee's Hammer swan song as far as anyone knew at the time, it's a fine, dark one. I don't really have the magical learning to evaluate the realism of To the Devil a Daughter's goetia offhand; I am inclined to think it was mostly faked with some theft from Aleister Crowley, but last summer at NecronomiCon Providence, I was the panelist on "Dust, Ash, and Iron: The Use and Presentation of Alchemy and Magic in the Works of H.P. Lovecraft" who was not a practicing occultist. It feels nonetheless like a real system, a real framework of powers and constraints within which we can see the characters operate even if we're never told the rules. Which brings me neatly to the scene I sought this movie out for.
As character actors have a habit of doing, in the fall of 2008 Denholm Elliott was suddenly everywhere I looked and because one of the places I happened to look was at TCM when To the Devil a Daughter was playing, one of my earliest images of him remains Henry Beddows, who at his steadiest, sanest, and most sober can still be described unflatteringly but not inaccurately by a perplexed Anna Fountain (Blackman), "Who's that squalid creature who's hooked himself onto John?" Having originally engaged Verney to keep his daughter away from the Children of the Lord—without, of course, disclosing the true facts of her relationship to them—he's frightened badly enough by the call from Father Michael that he ghosts on the writer, leaving his phone to ring off the hook, finally forcing Verney and David Kennedy (Valentine) to track him down at the manor he's supposed to have closed up for a business trip. They find a cold house full of sheeted furniture, the chest-shot corpse of the bodyguard who accompanied Catherine to the UK. Up at the top of the attics, they find a door marked with a crucifix, a real one instead of the familiar spraddle-legged arrogance of Astaroth astride an inverted cross. The voice on the other side is stammering and sobbing, choking incoherently to itself. What they find when they enter is a small, slant-eaved room where a single bulb illuminates an untidy vacancy of half-packed boxes and an incongruous armchair where the man they want is huddled with his arms around his knees and a pentagram chalked on the bare floor around him, not neatly. He has a pitcher of water at his feet and a three-day beard like mold on his face. He hasn't changed his clothes since his first appearance and both he and they are much the worse for wear. Whether he's trying to pray or just literally gibbering in terror, he seems barely conscious of Verney's questions and when David in a rage of disgust and impatience tries to shake an answer out of him and scuffs one of his chalk-lines in the process, Beddows flounders to his knees and frantically re-scribbles it at once. There may be no virtue in his ritual. He's not a practitioner or a scholar, he's a sponge with an appealing smile who after all will help save his daughter's soul only if the talisman of his "pact" is first retrieved for him from the altar of the church where eighteen years ago he stumbled into Satanism as drunkenly and helplessly as anything else in his life, without which he will die burning for his betrayal as the ghost of his wife (Anna Bentinck) warned him as she walked away from the cries of their newborn daughter into darkness. "There is nothing in you, Henry Beddows," Father Michael pronounced then, "of any strength or grace or value at all." And when he's alone again, there are dry scratching sounds as if something is trying the lock of the door, and when a wind from nowhere rises in the church to meet Verney and David, it whips through the litter of the attic room just as it does the altar cloth and the curtains and he clings to the chair's arm like a child and nothing comes in. The voice of his dead Isabella bounces around the corners of the empty, underlit room at the same time as she swings her bloodied legs off the altar and approaches the pair in the church and then she stands over her husband smiling, the gorget around her neck glowing red-hot as its "emblem of fire." She doesn't touch him. An entire confrontation takes place in Radleigh Church which the agonized Beddows can neither affect nor even perceive on more than some visceral, substitute level and when all of the ash and apparitions are over, his room is its shabby, undisturbed self again. It's the grubbiest scene in the picture, without even the glamour of blood or the titillation of sex; it made me think at the time of M. John Harrison's "The Great God Pan" (1988) and its novel The Course of the Heart (1992), but also "The Incalling" (1978) and most of the modern-day strand of Light (2002). It feels astonishingly real. If the entire film had been produced in that register, I think it might have come out a lot like Liam Gavin's A Dark Song (2016). I don't know that that would have been any more commercially viable in 1976 than the results Hammer actually got, but I would have enjoyed it.
Especially after such a concentrated blast of the uncanny, the ending is so disappointing that I don't want to get into describing it. It's not even outrageously stupid à la The Legend of Hell House (1973), it's just anticlimactic, abrupt, and so haphazard that I can't even tell if it's meant to be ambiguous. If I found out that the director's dog had eaten the real ending and what we were watching had been pieced together from the scraps, I wouldn't be surprised, just concerned for the dog's digestion. I'm pretty sure it's the reason I remembered the movie as sucking more than it does. It interests me that it feels so much more contemporary than my other experience of late Hammer, Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972), even though the eponymous point of that film was the confrontation of modernity with Victorian horror: perhaps because it doesn't have to stress the time, To the Devil a Daughter can simply inhabit its modern setting with its book launches and international flights, its location shooting of Heathrow and Mayfair and St Katharine Docks. The score by Paul Glass swirls and skitters with atonal voices and agitated strings, quarter-tones and intrusive percussion and harmonies as thick as glue. I understand anyone who wants to bow out on the underage nude scene, but the infant demon puppet is ickily effective for the fact that it's almost completely gratuitous. Altogether the film may have been an experiment, but I don't think it's one that director Peter Sykes should have felt majority-ashamed of, even if Wheatley himself hated it. It seems to exist on Blu-Ray with some commentaries I wouldn't mind having the information from. I'm just happy to know that I was right to remember Denholm Elliott in an armchair all these years. This incarnation brought to you by my unrepentant backers at Patreon.
Gratifyingly, it turns out that much more of the film is worth revisiting than I had remembered. Until it whiffs the ending so badly that to call it a damp squib would be an insult to fireworks of all weathers, it's more than just a placeholder in the cycle of occult thrillers that crowded the 1970's; it takes the familiar tesserae of skepticism and diablerie and apocalypse and nudity and at its best gets something chilly, grimy, and genuinely weird out of them, relying on audience intuition over onscreen explanation to pull off a surprisingly successful ratio of suggestion to blood-splattered sex magick. I suspect it helps that the premise is right there in the title. Words like black magic and Satanism don't enter the script until well into the second act, but by then the characters are merely acknowledging out loud what the audience has sensed since the stained-glass fall of the credits under which the iron-black unbending figure of Father Michael Rayner (Christopher Lee) endured his own excommunication in defiant silence: "It is not heresy and I will not recant!" We hear the ambiguity in the name of the "Children of the Lord" even before their ritual practices confirm that they recognize quite a different savior than their contemplative Catholic trappings suggest. When the name of Astaroth is finally spoken, it simply answers the question of which demon. What's concealed from us are the human details, what's behind the nervous ingratiation of Henry Beddows (Denholm Elliott), how seriously world-weary writer John Verney (Richard Widmark) takes the source material of his popular novels of the occult, how much the sheltered nun Catherine Beddows (Natassja Kinski) understands of the "great destiny" for which she has been retrieved from her Bavarian convent just in time for her eighteenth birthday on All Hallows' Eve. And while we may guess with reasonable accuracy at that destiny's general lineaments, we can't be confident until late in the sometimes dreamily oblique, sometimes bluntly messy game how it is to be achieved and how it might be thwarted, if it even can. It is remarkably relaxing to watch a horror film and not once want to scream at the characters for refusing to admit the kind of story they are obviously in. It frees up the tension for other, more interesting things.
Not having read the 1953 novel by Dennis Wheatley which John Peacock, Christopher Wicking, and an uncredited Gerald Vaughan-Hughes adapted into the next-to-last film theatrically released by Hammer Film Productions until the studio's revival in 2008, I don't know who to blame for the shortcomings in this admirably restrained approach to a plot which features, let's face it, two sacrificial childbirths, a protective circle drawn in a suicide's blood, a spontaneous combustion, a murder with a steel comb, a vision of the blood-slicked earthly form of an infant demon crawling from its incubator into the womb of the woman intended as its adult avatar, and a fleeting but full-frontal nude scene by an actress who was fourteen at the time of filming, which I found out after the fact. It is nicely symmetrical to furnish the protagonist and antagonist each with a pair of seconds, leaving Catherine as the point of contention and her weak-willed father as the wild card between them, but despite the embarrassment of talent contained in Honor Blackman, Anthony Valentine, Michael Goodliffe, and Eva Maria Meineke, neither the literary agent and her partner who deals in contemporary art nor the married couple of unblinkingly devout medical professionals register more than occasionally as characters as opposed to well-photographed devices. Catherine herself is nearly a cipher, which is fine if she's meant to have been raised deliberately vacant, a vessel to be filled with Astaroth, and not so fine if the film actually wants her to feel some ambivalence about this fate. There are hints of the latter—one minute she's passionately protesting to a revolted Verney, "Lord Astaroth . . . is good! I want to do good for the world, to serve my Lord!" and the next remembering, like an out-of-body experience or a drugged nightmare, an orgiastic ritual in which she was mock-mounted by the golden effigy of Astaroth in the same measured rhythm with which a gold-masked Father Michael copulated for real with an identically masked woman (Izabella Telezynska) as dark-haired and white-robed as Catherine herself. "I am Catherine!" she comes out of the memory crying, struggling and lashing out, "Catherine is mine!" as if she is both the girl desperately claiming her own reality and the devouring fiend to whom she was consecrated at birth in her dead mother's blood. "It was Margaret, but it was me! His spirit filled me!" She does not make it sound like an annunciation. Bred to it or not, she may well have some qualms about letting Astaroth inside her again. But she spends so much of the rest of the picture entranced or otherwise under the influence of Father Michael that when he warns at the crucial moment, "Everything she does now must be of her own free will," it feels like an empty formality. If she goes consenting to the Devil, it should be either triumphant or tragic, and here I'm not even sure it happened at all. Even Verney feels fuzzier around the edges than a man should whose professional fictions have suddenly become all too lethally real. He's not a strawman skeptic, explaining early on that "ninety-eight percent of so-called Satanists are nothing but pathetic freaks who get their kicks out of dancing naked in freezing churchyards. They use the Devil as an excuse for getting some sex. But then there's that other two percent. I'm not so sure about them." By the next morning, grimly and correctly, he's decided: "I have the feeling I'm dealing with the other two percent." But if this development perturbs his belief system, if it confirms it, if he has any faith of his own to draw on or if he's operating strictly by the rules of his research and if it makes a difference either way, we never get a clue; what we mostly learn about Verney is that he approaches his demonslaying with as much irritation as gravity, as though he'd much rather be dealing with the skyclad weirdos. It's a relatable attitude to be sure, but it leaves something of a lacuna in the film's metaphysics. Lastly, there is the unfair and unavoidable fact that Tanith Lee's "Malice in Saffron" (The Book of the Damned, 1988) is the single best story I have ever encountered about Satanist nuns and nothing in this movie matches its protagonist's revelation of the Angel Esrafel: "It came to her that she underwent a vision, a religious experience of Hell, but no less holy for being profane."
And yet I can forgive the movie all of these flaws because I love its magic, which is hardly ever called by that name. Almost none of it is done with special effects, unless you count theatrical lighting and a fisheye lens; all of it benefits from the wide-angle portraiture photography of David Watkin and the sympathetic editing of John Trumper in which ritual and reaction are intercut so naturally that no explanations are needed to convince the viewer of the lines of correspondence—spooky action at a distance. When the fruit of that less than immaculate conception comes to term, its birth is attended by the toys and stuffed animals of Catherine's childhood. She wails and thrashes in her sleep that night as if her body's the one bound in white silk vestments and racked with labor, but the next morning recalls uneasily, "I dreamt I was being born." Mirrors have always worked as doors and windows, but these days a poseable plastic doll can be just as effective a poppet as anything pinched out of wax. One especially striking sequence finds Father Michael seated with George and Eveline de Grasse (Goodliffe and Meineke) at a table marked with astrological signs and a pentagram around whose points are laid half a dozen golden dishes, each painted inside with a curious, half-classical image. One looks like a satyr, another a pointing hand, another resembles Éliphas Lévi's Baphomet. All begin face down and are turned up like Tarot cards as we watch. It is done in silence, unshowily. It gets results. At one point, a photograph of a younger Henry Beddows is seen lying across one of the dishes as if carelessly tossed there, and it can't mean anything good. When Father Michael called to remind him of his loyalties, a piece of plain rope wound around the priest's receiver became an adder coiling up the would-be recusant's arm. Any law of similarity can go both ways, of course—a slap across the face of spellbound Catherine doesn't just snap her out of it, it rocks Father Michael as if he'd taken the blow himself. The possibility of just this kind of occult aiki is one of the few elements of the climax that doesn't feel like it was spitballed on the spot and shot with the last film in the camera. Lee is magnificent in all of these scenes, I should mention, playing his role as self-appointed priest and prophet of Astaroth with all the pride expected of the Devil's emissary on earth but also the calmness of great conviction, as if he truly believes that earthing a demon of the first hierarchy in the body of an eighteen-year-old girl is the only way to "renew the vital spirit of the world." He has nothing but scorn for cringing Beddows who was never a true believer, but he's so tender with the women who give their lives for the cause that we don't doubt that if he were required to slit his own throat for the baptismal blood, we wouldn't find a hesitation mark on him afterward. He even pulls off a contrast during the birth scene that could have played like pure Charles Addams, Eveline shocked, George sickened, Father Michael smiling joyously. If the part was Lee's Hammer swan song as far as anyone knew at the time, it's a fine, dark one. I don't really have the magical learning to evaluate the realism of To the Devil a Daughter's goetia offhand; I am inclined to think it was mostly faked with some theft from Aleister Crowley, but last summer at NecronomiCon Providence, I was the panelist on "Dust, Ash, and Iron: The Use and Presentation of Alchemy and Magic in the Works of H.P. Lovecraft" who was not a practicing occultist. It feels nonetheless like a real system, a real framework of powers and constraints within which we can see the characters operate even if we're never told the rules. Which brings me neatly to the scene I sought this movie out for.
As character actors have a habit of doing, in the fall of 2008 Denholm Elliott was suddenly everywhere I looked and because one of the places I happened to look was at TCM when To the Devil a Daughter was playing, one of my earliest images of him remains Henry Beddows, who at his steadiest, sanest, and most sober can still be described unflatteringly but not inaccurately by a perplexed Anna Fountain (Blackman), "Who's that squalid creature who's hooked himself onto John?" Having originally engaged Verney to keep his daughter away from the Children of the Lord—without, of course, disclosing the true facts of her relationship to them—he's frightened badly enough by the call from Father Michael that he ghosts on the writer, leaving his phone to ring off the hook, finally forcing Verney and David Kennedy (Valentine) to track him down at the manor he's supposed to have closed up for a business trip. They find a cold house full of sheeted furniture, the chest-shot corpse of the bodyguard who accompanied Catherine to the UK. Up at the top of the attics, they find a door marked with a crucifix, a real one instead of the familiar spraddle-legged arrogance of Astaroth astride an inverted cross. The voice on the other side is stammering and sobbing, choking incoherently to itself. What they find when they enter is a small, slant-eaved room where a single bulb illuminates an untidy vacancy of half-packed boxes and an incongruous armchair where the man they want is huddled with his arms around his knees and a pentagram chalked on the bare floor around him, not neatly. He has a pitcher of water at his feet and a three-day beard like mold on his face. He hasn't changed his clothes since his first appearance and both he and they are much the worse for wear. Whether he's trying to pray or just literally gibbering in terror, he seems barely conscious of Verney's questions and when David in a rage of disgust and impatience tries to shake an answer out of him and scuffs one of his chalk-lines in the process, Beddows flounders to his knees and frantically re-scribbles it at once. There may be no virtue in his ritual. He's not a practitioner or a scholar, he's a sponge with an appealing smile who after all will help save his daughter's soul only if the talisman of his "pact" is first retrieved for him from the altar of the church where eighteen years ago he stumbled into Satanism as drunkenly and helplessly as anything else in his life, without which he will die burning for his betrayal as the ghost of his wife (Anna Bentinck) warned him as she walked away from the cries of their newborn daughter into darkness. "There is nothing in you, Henry Beddows," Father Michael pronounced then, "of any strength or grace or value at all." And when he's alone again, there are dry scratching sounds as if something is trying the lock of the door, and when a wind from nowhere rises in the church to meet Verney and David, it whips through the litter of the attic room just as it does the altar cloth and the curtains and he clings to the chair's arm like a child and nothing comes in. The voice of his dead Isabella bounces around the corners of the empty, underlit room at the same time as she swings her bloodied legs off the altar and approaches the pair in the church and then she stands over her husband smiling, the gorget around her neck glowing red-hot as its "emblem of fire." She doesn't touch him. An entire confrontation takes place in Radleigh Church which the agonized Beddows can neither affect nor even perceive on more than some visceral, substitute level and when all of the ash and apparitions are over, his room is its shabby, undisturbed self again. It's the grubbiest scene in the picture, without even the glamour of blood or the titillation of sex; it made me think at the time of M. John Harrison's "The Great God Pan" (1988) and its novel The Course of the Heart (1992), but also "The Incalling" (1978) and most of the modern-day strand of Light (2002). It feels astonishingly real. If the entire film had been produced in that register, I think it might have come out a lot like Liam Gavin's A Dark Song (2016). I don't know that that would have been any more commercially viable in 1976 than the results Hammer actually got, but I would have enjoyed it.
Especially after such a concentrated blast of the uncanny, the ending is so disappointing that I don't want to get into describing it. It's not even outrageously stupid à la The Legend of Hell House (1973), it's just anticlimactic, abrupt, and so haphazard that I can't even tell if it's meant to be ambiguous. If I found out that the director's dog had eaten the real ending and what we were watching had been pieced together from the scraps, I wouldn't be surprised, just concerned for the dog's digestion. I'm pretty sure it's the reason I remembered the movie as sucking more than it does. It interests me that it feels so much more contemporary than my other experience of late Hammer, Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972), even though the eponymous point of that film was the confrontation of modernity with Victorian horror: perhaps because it doesn't have to stress the time, To the Devil a Daughter can simply inhabit its modern setting with its book launches and international flights, its location shooting of Heathrow and Mayfair and St Katharine Docks. The score by Paul Glass swirls and skitters with atonal voices and agitated strings, quarter-tones and intrusive percussion and harmonies as thick as glue. I understand anyone who wants to bow out on the underage nude scene, but the infant demon puppet is ickily effective for the fact that it's almost completely gratuitous. Altogether the film may have been an experiment, but I don't think it's one that director Peter Sykes should have felt majority-ashamed of, even if Wheatley himself hated it. It seems to exist on Blu-Ray with some commentaries I wouldn't mind having the information from. I'm just happy to know that I was right to remember Denholm Elliott in an armchair all these years. This incarnation brought to you by my unrepentant backers at Patreon.
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I watched the trailer on Youtube; the image with the plates is arresting. And I can imagine the guy on the armchair vividly from your description--not surprised that it was an image that really lingered (and that really was in the film).
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Thank you! I don't quite understand how this film managed to feel so seamless and authentic about its rituals and so rackety about parts of the actual plot, but at least I find this ratio more interesting than the other way around. Movies that attempt the numinous/supernatural and then blow it are difficult for me.
I watched the trailer on Youtube; the image with the plates is arresting.
I never think to link or even look for trailers. I think it's because I don't watch them. Every couple of years I run across one that makes me want to see a movie, but then it's even odds if I actually do.
And I can imagine the guy on the armchair vividly from your description--not surprised that it was an image that really lingered (and that really was in the film).
I found a screenshot!
You can get an idea of the production design and the cinematography, too.
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It's a shot from later in the scene, when the wind is blowing from the church through the room. The establishing shots are straight-on, but I couldn't find a production still that wasn't covered in watermarks.
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You're welcome!
It makes me feel like a hopelessly derivative person, but I think that some of this scene and its associated emotions got into "The Boatman's Cure."
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Thank you. I don't feel bad about the source materials I'm aware of, but then I catch something that slipped in under the threshold and I worry.
"All night, he had huddled in his armchair as if within a charmed circle while Delia paced and turned pages in her croupier's slope of light, swallowing the tiredness she could not afford to yield to like a Charon's coin of blood . . ."
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On another topic. I have a movie I need you to see. [ETA: at your leisure, of course, and really it's a wish not a request, blah blah, etc.] I'm about to write about it.
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I look forward!
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I love the photography of this film. I genuinely think you could take any frame, even from one of the stupider scenes, and it would look fantastic. When I looked up David Watkin, his filmography was full of little no-name pictures like Help! (1965), The Devils (1971), The Boy Friend (1971), Chariots of Fire (1981), Return to Oz (1985), Out of Africa (1985), Moonstruck (1987) . . . Plus the title sequence of Goldfinger (1964), which charms me. I realize his work gave To the Devil a Daughter something I think of as different from the classic Hammer look, but I don't count it as a strike against the movie.
(It's also just a very relatable 2020 pose. Maybe a little less so, now. But we still have to get through the winter. We may end up in pentagrams yet.)
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2) "There is nothing in you[...]of any strength or grace or value at all." I deeply resent 1976 calling me out like that, as if I had even existed at the time.
Thank you for your public service and your writing which actually made me a bit interested in watching the highlights reel! Like, the one with all the blood and scary stuff not in it! I am sorry about the ending. Like, what.
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I like Christopher Lee! I don't know him as an actor as well as Peter Cushing, but I have not yet seen him in a part where I couldn't figure out what he was doing there.
2) "There is nothing in you[...]of any strength or grace or value at all." I deeply resent 1976 calling me out like that, as if I had even existed at the time.
. . . Someone got out of his jam-jar again, didn't he. And in the middle of an election, too. Just give your child the butterfly net and let them go to town. Or lure him back in with some Kaiserschmarrn.
Thank you for your public service and your writing which actually made me a bit interested in watching the highlights reel! Like, the one with all the blood and scary stuff not in it! I am sorry about the ending. Like, what.
You're welcome! I am glad it has that effect!
The ending is truly one of the fastest and most irrevocable ways I have seen a movie collapse, like the money, the time, and the film stock were all competing to see who could run out before production finished and it was a three-way tie.
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I have never even heard of it. I suspect I am not going to rush out to find it, either. The length really does make it sound like an orphaned piece of TV.
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And it just got out somehow into the wild? (I see from IMDb that Welles was involved only as narrator. It would make much more sense if it had been a project of his, which were always ending up half-completed or abandoned or reconstructed decades after the fact. Yes, I am still feeling bitter about The Deep.)
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That’s the mystifying part—that it somehow ended up in wide enough distribution to be on the shelves of a local video store in 1980s small-town New Brunswick, yet not wide enough to pick up any kind of Troll 2 cult following. Perhaps I underestimate the competition from other not-good but not-bad-enough-to-be-funny obscurities.
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You're welcome! Thank you so much for letting me know.
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I haven't! I know it's well regarded. What's it like?
I will watch pretty much anything with Christopher Lee in it, but it sounds like this is worth watching in any case, in spite of a lousy ending!
Definitely worth watching, especially for Christopher Lee and whatever ending you substitute for yourself.
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I feel I sense a theme.
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Edit: Nicole points out I am really good at freehanding a circle with either hand.
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I suspect the relevant answer is pop-cultural reification, but before that, I'm pretty sure one can blame the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. They didn't invent its apotropaic function, but they popularized it to the point where I believe the centrality of the inverted pentagram was one of the major ways Aleister Crowley flipped them off when he invented Thelema.
(The one time I recall, it was a ballroom.)
I remember when that went down! I approve that you have stayed out of ballrooms since, except to put some Regency people in them.
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I will stick to the skill I am unerringly decent at: knowing how many 5-pound boxes of Diamond Kosher OR drums of Morton Iodized we need to get through the night.
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Maybe that's where all your electrolytes are going.
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Thank you! I feel very complimented by that.