Directors: Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz
Writers: Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz
From: Chilling
Watch: archive.org
A young woman travels to a small coastal town in search of her father, but finds a horrible mystery instead.
We open with a man having his throat slashed poolside. Then credits, then a long shot of a woman in silhouette, stumbling down a hallway. She’s offering a disjointed paranoid rant about being institutionalized. We then flashback to her driving to the small town of Point Dunes to find her father. She hasn’t seen him in years and has only been communicating via letter. However, his letters have recently become strange and she’s worried about him.
Seaside town, strange correspondence, a storyteller we’ve been told from the start is institutionalized? I smell Lovecraft!
She stops for gas and finds the clerk shooting a gun into a nearby field. Howling can be heard. He says they’re dogs, but she says they don’t sound like dogs. He says there’s nothing out there but squirrels and rabbits. It has to be strays.
A truck pulls up and an albino gets out, standing rigid and staring into the distance. As the clerk’s filling the truck, he looks under a tarp in the back and sees the body of the man killed before the credits. The woman tries to pay via credit card, but the clerk tells her to leave. Later, while working in the garage, the clerk is killed by someone jumping out of a car.
In town, the woman finds her father’s house abandoned. No one in town claims to know him, but a trio—a man and two women—had stopped by an art gallery to inquire about his work. When the woman goes to talk to them, she finds them recording a story being told by a wino about how the town went mad fifty years ago under the blood moon. The wino leaves and the trio don’t have any info for the woman. Outside, the wino stops her and says if she sees her father, she’ll have to burn him. He won’t stay dead otherwise.
The trio ends up at the father’s house because the wino is found dead and dismembered outside their motel and no one else will offer them a room. Gradually, they each go off on their own and witness strange things in town or in the house. In the end, we get the final details of what put the woman in the institution to begin with.
I’m avoiding a full rundown of this movie because, well, I don’t think anything’s gained by longform summary in general unless it’s to highlight particularly ridiculous parts of a film (which, yes, means I think most of these posts in the Misery Mill are a failure), and because I kinda dig this movie and don’t want to spoil any of the surprises.
Only there really aren’t any surprises. As I noted above, you get echos of Lovecraft very quickly and tonally the film feels very influenced by Argento. A dreamlike energy suffuses the whole production. My notes even say, “Lovecraft by way of Argento.” On top of that, there’s a palpable influence from Carnival of Souls at play. So the tonal cues kind of tell you what's going to happen, but that doesn't dilute the pleasure of seeing these scenes carried out. One sequence in a movie theater is done particularly well.
Initially I was finding a bit of ironic enjoyment in the film because the speech the woman gives in voice over at the beginning is so overwrought and ridiculous. However, it’s also done without background music so you can cut it directly from the film and drop it into a Halloween mixtape or broadcast on a radio show. Likewise, the scream they dub in when the clerk dies is hilarious.
However, the tone of the film took over after that, and rather quickly. For instance, when the woman is asking about her father at the art gallery, she initially is asking questions of a blind mute. A blind person selling art sounds like it’s going to be played up for a gag, but it instead serves as a means of heightening the strangeness of the whole situation.
And I’ll leave it there. We do get an instance of a man on fire, which is always a way of improving a movie from my point of view, but I was going to recommend it even before it arrived at burning man. As an added bonus, the movie’s in the public domain. I’ve added an MPEG-2 copy to archive.org here, but I’d only recommend that if you need an uncompressed version for editing purposes. If you want to watch the movie, get this remastered widescreen cut from archive.org. The colors are better and it’s the full image.
Because of its dreamy logic, you can watch this both as something you give your full attention to as well as something that’s just on in the background. It doesn’t have a plot so much as escalating incidents. Definitely bookmark it for future Halloween plans.
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