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The point of departure is the burning witch's curse in Day of Wrath, here Lucifer hears her call and the 17th-century Massachusetts hamlet is embalmed in fog "like a picture out of a history book." Cut to the year of Psycho, when the college professor (Christopher Lee) points out the Puritan mob's motivation ("superstition, fear and jealousy") to the inquisitive coed (Venetia Stevenson). Her term paper calls for first-hand evidence, and who receives her at the Raven's Inn but the harridan (Patricia Jessel) who smiled through flames three centuries earlier? Dead birds near the trapdoor, cloaked figures chanting in the dark: "This would be more effective at midnight, with howling winds and crashing thunder." New England viewed from the old one, a jazzy incantation from John Llewellyn Moxey. The village's opposite poles are a blind reverend (Norman Macowan) and a warlock who thumbs a ride (Valentine Dyall), the victim's skeptical brother (Dennis Lotis) arrives just in time for the Sabbath. (The professor knows the area because he was born there, indeed there's an ancient grave bearing his name in the cemetery.) One character drives through the thick mist and gets the demonic hitchhiker, another later follows the same steps, a third breaks the loop by swerving off the road after a fiery vision—the marvelously dreamlike circularity of asking for directions toward your own doom. "The basis of fairy tales is reality, the basis of reality is fairy tales." A modest composition that turns out to be quite the genre intersection, from its proximity to Black Sunday to its foreglimpses of Rosemary's Baby and The Wicker Man. (Franco's casting of Lee in The Bloody Judge is a knowing nod.) With Betta St. John, Tom Naylor, Ann Beach, and James Dyrenforth. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |