Ah 1966, what an excellent year for human sacrifice. Still two years off from ROSEMARY'S BABY and the sudden hipster clout it engendered, '66's INCUBUS and EYE OF THE DEVIL are twin heralds to Polanski's masterpiece: one co-stars Polanski's wife and mirrors Rosemary's feeling of being shut out of some grand conspiracy; the other is like her crazy Esperanto dream. I can only imagine how much better each would be had they been made in 1969 instead, when the fangs were properly installed in the balls of horror cinema. Of course by then the ingenue of EYE couldn't have been in it, and she's the only thing worth watching for. There are those 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 Manson. But they're crazy, right?
There's a rumor that the many weird rumors of strange accidents and Satanic coincidences during ROSEMARY's production originate in ballyhoo maestro William Castle's imagination. Some say he took his gimmickry to a whole new level, way way past chair buzzers and skeletons on strings, too far, perhaps, because when the subject is Satan, our mostly Christian nation's water cooler gossip heats to boiling. As John Ford or Sutter Kane would say, when everyone believes the legend, the truth warps to accommodate it.
That's where it gets super tricky. These pagan devil cultures offer a much more fatalistic world view than the sacrifice-free Christianity. With Satan there's a gruesome payoff where the subject learns he's "always been the caretaker," and so forth. Ask not whom is sacrificed on the ancient altar. It's always you, doing both the killing and the being killed.
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 and then lashing out at those who dare let their freak flag fly... or he can let go of the handrails and let Satan's magnet pull him towards the full realization of his unholy destiny. If we apply that logic to the actual making of these films, Tate is doomed the moment husband Polanski helps her get the part in EYE, just the way Rosemary is doomed when Roman (!) Castavet helps Rosemary's husband get his part. And Polanski is doomed the moment he shoots a scene wherein a woman is drugged and date raped by Satan. And we're doomed to have the resurgence of the Salem mindset, ala The 'Satanic panic' of the early 80s.Even if for the moment we believe all this 'nonsense.' That's fuzzy logic, what Stephen Colbert would call "truthiness" but anyone who denies it completely, is 100% sure it's not true, is just asking for trouble. Satan never singles out the open-minded for his mischief. It's always the sure and pious ones who draw him, their unsullied souls like a flag to a bull.
I mention all this because without Sharon Tate EYE OF THE DEVIL is a grand bore. It draws you in tight like that beetle tied to a string in the middle of a Summers Isle school desk, but then lets you go home restless and unsatisfied. Set mostly at an un-devilish vineyard in the south of France, for most of the movie we're stuck with Deborah Kerr's nosey parker chasing after her pale husband, played like a half-asleep nonentity by David Niven, whose being prepared for some diabolical festival. Following him like a stalker mom worried he's skateboarding without a helmet, she's a real buzzkill. He says please, babe, stop crowding me! Tate and David Hemming's as a pair of magical blonde twins have mere supporting role, and though Niven's angry flogging of an all-dressed-in-black Tate makes the poster, it's just another joyless punitive measure. The film would rather focus in on Kerr begng outraged over David Hemmings shooting down a white dove with his little bow and arrow. When she spies on him and his equally strange blonde sister, Odille (Sharon Tate) as they bring said dove on a pillow into a weird looking Satanic ceremony, Kerr orders them off the property, like she's Dustin Hoffman in STRAW DOGS or Jessica Biel in the 2003 remake of TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (see my op here), going into weird backwaters uninvited to harass the locals, a mutton-headed missionary enforcing a hypocritically "Christian" concept of law and order without really examining the extent in which her colonialist animus-dominated sense of superiority clouds her awareness. As a kind of unwittingly dosed Mary Poppins in THE INNOCENTS, Kerr was amazing. She carried that horror film on her shoulders; DEVIL might be the film if those two weird kids grew up to be blonde Satanists, stalking the ample grounds like Warhol superstars. But Kerr doesn't carry EYE, she spills it on the floor and starts lecturing anyone who tries to clean it up. The animus-incubus-like Peter Quint was the corrupting voluptuary shadow to Kerr's 'proud, white, upstanding Buddha' in THE INNOCENTS, driving her like a 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 husband and bring him back to her tedious harp performances. We have no choice but to wish we could ditch her and ride with the Rochesters, but our director follows her everywhere, visiting Niven as he lurches around like a post-bones-tossed Queequeg, wicked blondes Sharon Tate and Hemmings loiter in black turtlenecks, turning toads into doves, and Flora Robson chokes back tears because oh not, it's all happening again, and we in the audience are forced to spend the bulk of the film with the boring mom as she runs about doing all in her power to stop the one interesting thing that might happen in this nowhere town.And she's like my mom 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. Or why I need to just sleep the day away. And stay up all night....
Luckily that old devil stretching through into the future via this movie's cold womb foreshadows future classics. The music played during the 13 Days Festival sounds eerily similar to Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" and after that just imagine the film as a vision of what ROSEMARY'S BABY might be like if Rosemary started the film far too old to be the parent of her two shockingly young children --only one of whom seems possessed by a Damien Thorn. If not for Tate's real life fate-and-sorrow drenched story lending EYE the same eerie black magic ballyhoo synchronicity of ROSEMARY and THE EXORCIST it would be worthless. But it's like her version of James Dean's Highway Safety promo film. She is the 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.
If this were somehow true then the devil is alive and well in any representation of his evil influence, a kind of inter-active 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 Mansons.Even with all that, is 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 archery teacher? Nein! It's too cold and impersonal, it lacks the fears we harbor for the knife.
And we come to hate Kerr for dragging us away from the action, like IMITATION OF LIFE's Annie Johnson trying to grab her Sarah Jane from trying to pass for white in death's cold marble nightclub. Everyone else wants whatever is going to happen to happen, including us. We didn't start watching a movie called EYE OF THE DEVIL so we could see Deborah Kerr swamp the fire. We're going to root for Sharon Tate, no matter what. 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!
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| If the devil's eye offends thee, Kerr, pluck it from its hottie roost! |
It's hard to believe that 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 one person who's got a dashing air of wit and sparkle: 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). It 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 your roll with the absurdity of it all, but not to the point you kill the atmosphere.
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 mike jazz dance performance if it was shot by Dennis Hopper as an ONIBABA-style timeless psychosexual folk tale for Roger Corman over a single weekend out at Big Sur, INCBUS would make a good double bill with NIGHT TIDE. The Esperanto angle adds just the right dash of weirdness to the story of a succubus hanging around a healing spring, driving infirm men to their deaths for big daddy Satan. She longs to corrupt a good pure soul instead of just offing the perverse and corrupted, but her older sister advises against it. She's right. But they have a back-up plan when things go south: unleash the Incubus on the good soul's equally good (i.e. virginal) sister!
This would actually make a netter 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 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 the "Ed Wood on a dime bag of Ingmar Bergman" Leslie Stevens. But INCUBUS has everything: blondes in black turtlenecks under peasant girl smocks; William Shatner as a variation of Jack Nicholson's Napoleonic solider sick of war and wandering the Big Sur coast in THE TERROR, refracted through the love of Richard Burton's priest in SANDPIPER if he was played by Eva Marie Saint. Sure it sounds overbaked... but a succubus feeling sexually violated because Kirk brought her to church while she was asleep? Senpreza!
In the end, INCUBUS and EYE OF THE DEVIL have a lot in common, fault-wise: EYE is way too dry; INCUBUS way too singleminded and didactic, but they share a strength, too: a unique ambiguity about which 'side' they're on. 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, and the evil men--Pazuzu, Guy--vile enough that we're rooting for the right team. But we're rooting for Tate and Hemmings in EYE, as their plan seems in jeopardy because of Kerr's imperialist meddling, and why else would we be watching if not to see Tate do evil stuff? And thanks to Kerr's tired grandstanding, Tate has barely any time to really radiate. And ditto INCUBUS: do 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! Jesu, set my people iri....
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