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31 Days of Fright: Candyman

Candyman handles bees in the face way better than Nic Cage did in The Wicker Man.

This January, in support of the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre / Multicultural Women Against Rape, friends and family have raised over $1,000, which means I have to watch and write about thirty-one horror movies. I’ll watch (on average) one movie a night, many of them requested by donors, after which I’ll write some things about said movies on this website. Be forewarned that all such write-ups will contain spoilers! Last night’s film was Candyman, directed by Bernard Rose (Immortal Beloved), and suggested by donor Darla Woodley. Though I’ve never met Darla Woodley, we collaborated on a children’s book together! Darla’s book, called Red Socks Go with Absolutely Anything, is a encouraging story about how a simple pair of red socks can give a child a little boost when they are feeling out of their comfort zone. Don’t be misled by the fact that Woodley recommended the gory and depraved Candyman, her children’s book is quite delightful. Candyman was rented from my (maybe) friends at Queen Video.

What happens:

Based on a short story by horror writer Clive Barker called “The Forbidden,” Candyman is that rare beast: an urban horror film. Whereas so many horror movies take place in remote cabins and mountaintop villas, so few happen in the heart of a major city. Candyman is set in The City with Big Shoulders, Chicago. The film opens with a voiceover by (we can assume) the Candyman himself – not to be confused with Rene from Danish pop band Aqua – who asks us while the screen fills with bees, “What’s blood for, if not for shedding?” (I feel like a hematologist would have a lot of good answers to this question.) Then he warns that with his hook for hand, he’ll split us from groin to gullet. Then a swarm of bees envelops Chicago, just like in a Wu-Tang video.

A woman begins to tell Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen, looking a lot like Madonna) a “true story,” she claims. A friend of a friend, Clara, was babysitting when local bad boy, Billy, came over. She tells him the legend of Candyman: if you say “Candyman” five times in the mirror, this guy with a bloody stump for a hand that has a hook protruding from the hand’s meat (gross!) will appear. They say his name four times in the bathroom mirror while Billy begins to undress Clara. They chicken out at four, and Billy heads downstairs. But Clara, left alone in the washroom, says it one last time. She was found split open by a hook, and the baby was killed, as well. Only Billy survived the encounter and went insane soon afterward.

 

“Candyman? I bought you a really nice coat …”

Why is this woman telling Helen Lyle this gruesome story? That’s because Helen is a university researcher a the University of Illinois, who, with friend Bernadette Walsh (Kasi Lemmons), is gathering stories about urban legends for her thesis. Helen in married to professor Trevor Lyle (Xander Berkeley), who when we first see him is lecturing about alligators in the sewers. Helen sits in on the end of the class, then chases away eager student Stacey (Carolyn Lowery), who’s been making eyes at her husband. She scolds Trevor for lecturing on urban legends, as she wanted him to wait until she and Bernadette were done their thesis. She asks him about Stacey and Trevor is offended at the suggestion of any impropriety with one of his students.

Working late, Helen meets the custodian, Henrietta Moseley (Barbara Alston), who – after overhearing Helen’s recorded interviews – says she has a friend who lives in Cabrini-Green, Chicago’s somewhat infamous housing projects, who knows someone killed by the Candyman. Henrietta retrieves her fellow custodian, Kitty, who recounts the story of a girl named Ruthie Jean, who was killed by someone who broke into her apartment through the medicine cabinet. Intrigued, Helen goes through microfilm of Chicago newspapers and discovers there actually was a woman named Ruthie Jean who was murdered in Cabrini-Green. Maybe there is some truth behind this urban legend.

At her and Trevor’s apartment, Helen shows Bernadette some of the recent research she’s done. She displays for her the printouts of the Ruthie Jean murder and asks Bernadette if she notices anything. The building in Cabrini-Green and Helen’s own apartment are the same building. Her condo building was originally built as a housing project, but then city planners realized there was no barrier like a highway to keep the building closed off from the rest of the city, so they turned it into high-end condominiums. (Sounds familiar.) Helen shows Bernadette that the project building layout has a trick wall behind the medicine cabinet – you could easily enter into the unit next door. They then dare each other to play “Candyman” in the mirror, but only Helen is willing to say it five times. To give the audience its first decent jump scare, Trevor arrives home drunk late at night and leaps on Helen in bed, terrifying her something good. (Virginia Madsen is not a great screamer: she’s no Jamie Lee Curtis.)

The next morning, Helen and Bernadette drive to Cabrini-Green. Some first-person accounts will lend credence to their thesis that a disadvantaged urban group has taken to attributing the daily horrors of life in the projects to a mythical creature. But they drive with some trepidation, given the stories they’ve heard about gangs in the area. (Bernadette has brought mace along.) Bernadette is also worried that they look like cops with the way they’re dressed, and her fears are not unfounded. As soon as they exit their car, local toughs begin catcalling them and warning the neighbourhood that the “5-0″ has arrived.

Undeterred – though a little nervous – they head upstairs toward Ruthie Jean’s old apartment. On the way, Helen is distracted by some really neat graffiti – “SWEETS TO THE SWEET” – and has to take a bunch of photos like a run-of-the-mill poverty tourist. She’s suddenly scared by a nearby apartment’s Rottweiler. The dog’s owner – a housekeeper, by her uniform – makes the dog heel and returns inside. Helen and Bernadette enter the abandoned apartment and Helen discovers the layout is identical to her own (though it’s obviously not in quite the same shape). The mirror in the washroom is in pretty good shape, but the back wall of the medicine cabinet was torn open some time ago. Helen wants to crawl through to the other side, but Bernadette attempts to stop her. Helen pushes ahead, walking through a circular doorway that serves as the mouth of a mural illustration. On the floor, she finds a nest of wrapped candy with razorblades inside – another urban legend seemingly come to life! Eventually, the housekeeper next door asks what the two women are doing. “Whites don’t ever come here, ‘kept to cause us problems,” she notes. They enter the apartment of the woman, Anne-Marie McCoy (Vanessa Williams), who is caring for a young baby, Anthony. Anne-Marie knows they’ve come because of Ruthie Jean. She asserts that the Candyman is real, and he’ll never be caught.

 

Helen and Bernadette discuss Candyman, whether or not he is really from Bountyland.

Over a self-important academic luncheon, Helen tells her advisor, Professor Philip Purcell (Michael Culkin), who also has an interest in urban legends, that her work is going to put his to shame. He laughs condescendingly and Helen reveals that they’ve been to Cabrini-Green recently. Purcell immediately recognizes that they’re investigating the Candyman. An expert on the subject, he outlines the legend of the Candyman. The legend first appeared in 1890. Candyman was the son of a slave who became wealthy (and a free man, I guess?) through the invention of a cobbling device. The man’s son (Candyman) grew up in high society and showed a talent for art, eventually becoming a portrait artist. A landowner hired him to paint his daughter, but the artist and daughter fell in love and the daughter soon became pregnant. The landowner, horrified that a black man had impregnated his daughter, hired “local hooligans” to exact his revenge. They chased him to Cabrini-Green where they sawed off his drawing hand with a rusty saw. Then they smeared him with honey and let loose some bees from the nearby apiary. (That was handy.) The bees stung him to death, but for good measure, the goons also set fire to his body.

Helen returns to Cabrini-Green on her own. Anne-Marie is at work, but a neighbourhood kid, Jake (DeJuan Guy), is loitering in the hallway. She asks Jake if he knows about Ruthie Green, and Jake admits he does, but he can’t talk about it. The Candyman will get him. Helen bargains with Jake: if he just shows him something, but doesn’t say anything, it would be their little secret and the Candyman would never know. Winning the child over with this logic, Helen follows Jake past a massive pile of trash – apparently the future site of a bonfire – to a desolate public washroom. Jake tells her a horrible story about what happened inside.

A developmentally challenged child, Charlie, had to go to the washroom. His mom, shopping in a store across the street, became frustrated with him, and sent him across the street to the washroom on his own. That’s when she heard screaming. A big tough guy from the neighbourhood ran inside and staggered out, his hair now entirely white. And what happened to Charlie, Jake says, was worse than death. In flashback, we see the boy, clutching his crotch, screaming in a pool of blood on the tiled floor. The toilet itself, is splattered with blood and gore. Not spooked enough by this horror story, Helen enters the washroom to check it out on her own.

She enters the washroom and is overcome by a powerful stench. Someone has written “SWEETS TO THE SWEET” on the walls with human excrement. Also written in poo: an arrow pointing to a toilet. Helen opens the lid and finds the toilet bowl full of swarming bees (which, to be honest, is probably one of the better things that could have been inside). As she turns to leave a tall man in a black trench coat enters and brandishes a hook (though he clearly has two hands). A number of other goons enter and corner Helen in the washroom. One holds her hands behind her and the hook man says, “I hear you’re looking for the Candyman, bitch. Well, you found him.” Then he smacks her across the head with the hook.

 

False alarm: this is just a candyman, not THE Candyman.

Helen, with a prominent black eye, sits in a police precinct and identifies the Candyman from a police lineup. The detective, Frank Valento (Gilbert Lewis) congratulates her. “Did he kill Ruthie Jean?” Helen asks. The detective is certain that this “Candyman,” who runs local gang The Overlords, is responsible for that and a number of murders. But no one would testify against him before, as the police have a hard time protecting eyewitnesses in the projects. Jake, who found the unconscious Helen, is waiting in the police reception, and Helen thanks him for saving her life. Jake, however, is less than enthusiastic. He says that Helen told their secret, and now the Candyman will get him. Helen assures him that the Candyman isn’t real. It was just a hoax the local gang leader exploited to intimidate people.

When Helen recovers enough to return to the university, Bernadette gives her a box of slides developed from her photos of Cabrini-Green. And Bernadette has more good news: it sounds like publishers have taken an interest in Helen’s work. Helen, pretty darn pleased with herself, begins to inspect the slides on the way to her car, when a dapper man follows her into the aboveground parking garage. In his deep voice, smooth as oiled leather, the man calls for Helen. He stands at the far end of the garage in a full-length fur coat. Also – quite noticeably – he has a hook protruding from the bloody pulp has has for a hand. Looks like this might be the genuine article Candyman (Tony Todd)! He tells Helen that he came for her, and she, seemingly mesmerized, doesn’t know what to do. “Be my victim,” he insists. That’s when Helen blacks out.

When she opens her eyes, she’s lying on the floor of a strange washroom, covered in blood. A woman screams outside the locked door. Helen opens the door and sees that the trail of blood leads to the severed head of a Rottweiler. She’s in Anne-Marie’s apartment! Helen picks up a discarded meat cleaver (clearly the weapon in the dog beheading) and goes to the bedroom, where Anne-Marie is screaming in front of an empty crib that’s covered in blood. She turns to see Helen and calls her a murderer. Anne-Marie knocks Helen down and begins to smash her head against the floor. Helen retaliates by slicing her shoulder with the cleaver. When the police burst in, Helen has the cleaver held to Anne-Marie’s head.

 

Helen’s knife sales pitch goes a little too far.

Detective Frank Valento, very disappointed in his star witness, tells Helen she’s being arrested. The Chicago police treat dog decapitation as a pretty serious crime and, besides, Anne-Marie’s baby has gone missing. Helen makes her one state-sanctioned phone call to Trevor, but he’s not home. (It’s 3 AM, Trevor! Where are you at?) In her jail cell that night, Helen dreams of the Candyman, who holds Anthony hostage in his creepy apartment in Cabrini-Green. The next morning, Trevor and his lawyer bail Helen out and they fight through a media circus to escape home.

Helen hasn’t been charged yet because the police are hoping to find Anthony’s body so they can charge Helen with first-degree murder. She asks Trevor where he was last night, and he claims to have been fast asleep. Helen relaxes in the tub, and though Trevor worries about leaving her alone for any period of time, he goes to retrieve some papers from the university anyway. While home alone, Helen fires up the old carousel and views the slides she took in the Cabrini-Green projects. In one photograph, where she stands in front of a broken mirror, she spots a dark figure looming over her shoulder. Is it the Candyman? Helen goes to her bathroom vanity but doesn’t speak a word. She opens the cabinet door and a hook hand shoots out of the inside, swatting at her. Helen dashes from the apartment into the hallway, but the man in the fur coat waits for her at the end of the hall, beckoning Helen with his velvet-smooth voice. He is upset with Helen: her disbelief has destroyed his congregation.

Helen locks herself in the apartment and tries to call for help, but the Candyman just appears inside her living room. Helen crumples to the floor, and – like Jon Hamm with Tina Fey – the Candyman caresses her with his hook, blood running down her neck. Bernadette arrives with flowers at the apartment door and rings the bell. Helen yells at her friend to leave, but Berandette, concerned with all the shouting, forces her way in and is surprised by the Candyman. A lot of screams and wet ripping sounds follow. Trevor returns home moments later and finds Helen unconscious on the floor, butcher knife in her hand and blood drenching her clothes. When Helen comes to, she’s been handcuffed in her own bed – and not in a sexy way. The police are on the scene – the murder scene, that is. Helen runs to the living room, hands tied behind her back, and sees upon the floor the gruesome body of Bernadette, cut up the middle.

Helen hears the Candyman in her head now, is haunted by visions of his ruined apartment, dripping with blood. Candyman loves being dead, he tells her. It’s so much better living in dreams and nightmares. Helen is taken to a mental hospital and strapped to a gurney. While she struggles with her manacles, Candyman appears to her, floating just above her body. Helen begins to scream and flop around until the orderlies must sedate her. Later, Helen is wheeled to the office of Dr. Burke (Stanley De Santis), who reveals that she’s been in the hospital for a full month, mostly under the influence of thorazine. Her trial for the first-degree murder of Bernadette Walsh will begin soon, and Burke is to assess her ability to stand trial. Burke then shows her the video from the night she was admitted – there was no Candyman over her gurney at all. She imagined it all!

 

Candyman learned the hard way how difficult it is to get bloodstains out of fur.

Desperate to believe she hasn’t lost her mind, Helen says she’ll prove that Candyman exists. She turns to face a mirror in the office and summons him. Nothing happens. But then Dr. Burke starts choking and sputtering blood. Candyman appears, goring the psychiatrist from behind. Once Burke has been thoroughly gutted, Candyman frees Helen from her bonds then leaps backwards, smashing through the office window. Helen follows, crawling along the building’s ledge. Eventually she finds the window to another hospital room and, entering, quickly knocks out the nurse inside. She steals her uniform and escapes from the hospital. All thanks to the Candyman.

Naturally, she runs to Trevor’s apartment, where the door has been left open. But – betrayal of betrayals – his student Stacey has seemingly shacked up with him, and the two are painting the apartment, a symbol of new love heretofore only seen in bank advertisements. Helen, incredibly hurt, starts to pace the apartment and toss paint buckets at the wall. When Stacey goes to reach for the telephone, Helen snaps at her. She burns holes into Trevor’s forehead with her thousand-yard stare (not literally, of course) and growls, “What’s the matter, Trevor? Scared of something?” She storms out and Trevor immediately dials the hospital.

The lost Helen seeks guidance from the Chicago River, and Candyman, still in her head, tells her to come to him, for “All you have left is my desire for you.” Helen returns to the projects in Cabrini-Green and finds the apartment hidden behind the medicine cabinet. In the interim, someone went to Chapters or Pottery Barn and bought a whole bunch of votive candles to spruce the place up. Helen finds a hook on the floor, then proceeds upward. In a very messy room – Candyman is a true bachelor – Helen finds her fur-coated tormenter asleep on a stone table. She raises her hook above her head and as he wakes, drives the hook into his neck. But it has no effect.

Helen can’t defeat Candyman, it seems, so she takes him up on his offer. If she surrenders herself to him, Candyman will return Anne-Marie’s child unharmed. She acquiesces, and Candyman begins to lift her skirt with his bloody hook hand. “Come with me and be immortal,” he suggests, and opens his coat to reveal a rib cage filled with swarming bees. His mouth is also full of bees now, and he swoops in for a deep, bee-filled kiss with Helen. She wakes up, brushing imaginary bees from her mouth. Helen is now back in the original candlelit apartment, the hook still in her hand. However, a new message and new mural is on the wall. Over a fresco that seems to depict Candyman’s origin story is the message: “IT WAS ALWAYS YOU, HELEN.”

John Cusack had his boom box and Peter Gabriel song; Candyman had to improvise.

John Cusack had his boom box and Peter Gabriel song; Candyman had to improvise.

A baby’s cry pierces the cold Chicago air; it appears to be coming from the trash mountain. (They plan well ahead for bonfires in the projects.) Helen begins to climb Mount Trashmore to find the infant Anthony. Jake, meanwhile, is awakened by the commotion. When he goes to his window, he sees a hook (Helen’s) slip into the mound of garbage. “He’s here,” Jake whispers. While Helen roots around in the immense pile of trash, Jake and some older friends douse the mountain in gasoline. They set it ablaze and soon the whole neighbourhood comes out into the streets to enjoy the bonfire. Helen finds the baby just as flames begin to surround her. That’s when Candyman appears behind her, muffling her mouth.

The crowd chants, “Burn him! Burn him!,” and Helen – finally breaking free from Candyman – picks up a flaming stick and drives it into Candyman’s belly. He flails around, causing some of the flaming trash to fall onto Helen’s back. Eventually, she scrambles out of the flaming garbage heap. Her back and hair have caught on fire, but she’s managed to protect the baby. Anne-Marie can’t believe what she’s seeing. Neighbours smother the flames and take Anthony from her, but Helen’s head and back are covered in third-degree burns; her ears even seem to have melted off. Candyman, trapped in the flames, howls, “Come back to me!” as he is swallowed by the fire. Jake can see his charred corpse among the garbage: Candyman was real.

Helen apparently had no friends, as her funeral is attended only by Trevor, his new girlfriend Stacey, and those two other professors from the luncheon. But then a procession of all the hundreds of people from Cabrini-Green, led by Anne-Marie and Jake arrives to pay their respects. Jake takes Candyman’s hook and drops it into the open grave. In the final scene of the film, Trevor, overcome with grief, hides in the bathroom from Stacey. He cries over Helen while Stacey reluctantly makes dinner solo with the largest butcher knife I’ve ever seen. Trevor, a total mess, gazes into the vanity mirror and says “Helen” five times. She appears, burns upon her naked scalp and a hook for a hand. She quotes herself – “What’s the matter, Trevor? Scared of something?” – and stabs him in the gut. When Stacey goes to the washroom to check on her professor boyfriend, she finds him in the tub, completely disembowelled. Stacey screams and the camera zooms in on a mural of a saintly Helen Lyle on some project apartment wall.

 

Trevor has all his most regretful thoughts on the toilet.

Takeaway points:

  • A better name for Candyman might be White Privilege: The Movie. One might be tempted to think today’s current focus on white privilege is something relatively new, but obviously it was front of mind in 1992. Helen outlines the issue pretty clearly: “Two people get brutally murdered and nothing happens. A white woman gets beat up and the police lock the place down.” This is the principle that underlies the Black Lives Matter movement (aside from the fact that Black Lives Matter explicitly concerns police killings, and not Candyman killings). Helen and her upper-middle-class black friend Bernadette are terrified to enter Cabrini-Green, not even realizing their fears are based on stories that are as much an urban legend as the sewer alligators Trevor jokes about. The movie also interrogates the idea of mining other cultures for material. After all, two academics head into the projects to take the stories of disadvantaged racialized people in order to prove their thesis, which is troubling, no matter how good the intentions of their project. It’s telling that the horror experienced by the black characters manifests in actual bodily harm: castration, infant abduction, death. The horror experienced by our white protagonist is that she is being accused of murder. The black characters fear actual pain; the white character fears being labelled. If that’s not white privilege, I don’t know what is.
  • The film treads the fine line between representing and stereotyping black culture. The sad fact is, it was novel to see so many black characters in a horror film. And particularly cool to see Tony Todd as perhaps the most charming movie monster since Dracula. At the same time, Candyman – particularly given his origin story – could be viewed as an egregious stereotype of the black seducer, come to “steal all the white women.” More troubling is how Helen effectively becomes saviour to the black community in the finale. The project residents pay their respects as if Helen were Atticus Finch leaving the courtroom. The final shot almost turns her into the Patron Saint of Cabrini-Green. Despite those two issues, Candyman generally handles issues of race well, explicitly interrogating white privilege (see above), for instance, or describing how city planners aimed to keep black communities from the rest of the city via physical barriers like highways. Candyman also shot on location at the real Cabrini-Green housing projects, using local people as extras.
  • The music in Candyman was composed by modern American composer Philip Glass! It’s strange this horror movie features an original Glass score, but the incredible gothic soundtrack really adds another dimension to the film. It effectively helps create what is, in essence, an Inner-city Gothic. Apparently, Glass claims he was misled about the project, believing he was working on an artistic independent film project rather than a low-budget slasher pic. But he has since come to terms with the film.
  • Apparently those are real bees swarming all over Tony Todd and Virginia Madsen! They were specially bred for the movie to look like mature bees, even though they were adolescents whose stingers would do less damage. Todd actually had a mouth full of bees, with only a mouthguard to keep the bees from flying down his throat. Madsen is allergic to bees, so an ambulance was on set whenever a bee sequence was in effect. Celebrities: they’re just like us!

Truly terrifying or truly terrible?: I’d be willing to categorize Candyman as terrifying. But it’s also just an entertaining, well-made movie, with a little more (overt) interest in social issues than the average horror film.

 

Say hello to the toughest – and best-dressed – man in Cabrini-Green.

Best outfit: Helen Lyle has some really great outfits, including a ribbed blue sweater that she wears with brown leather gloves. And I could write an entire essay on Trevor’s patterned vest. But nothing beats the killer look of a character who barely has one scene: “the big, tough guy” from Jake’s flashback, complete with an amber leather coat and beret.

Best line: “What if someone’s packin’ drugs in there?” – a concerned Bernadette Walsh, making up slang as she goes along

Best kill: That’s a tough call. The castrated boy in the washroom is probably the most disturbing, but it’s a little too unsettling (and not really a “kill”). Watching Dr. Burke sputter up blood in his office was much more fun.

Unexpected cameo: Ted Raimi (brother of Sam, co-star of SeaQuest: DSV), looking thirty-five, plays rebel teen Billy from the story that opens the movie. But even better than a Ted Raimi appearance – which is pretty awesome – is that Gilbert Lewis, who plays Detective Frank Valento, sometimes played The King of Cartoons on Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. In object cameos, booksellers will be amused to see an Ingram shipping box among the assembled junk in Trevor’s paint-ready apartment.

Unexpected lesson(s) learned: You can afford the bail for dog beheading and child abduction on an adjunct professor’s salary.

Most suitable band name derived from the movie: The Overlords. Or Cabrini-Green.

Next up: Prophecy (1979).

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31 Days of Fright: Deadly Blessing

Ernest Borgnine, demonstrating some of that Oscar-winning subtlety.

Ernest Borgnine, demonstrating some of that Oscar-winning subtlety.

This January, in support of the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre / Multicultural Women Against Rape, friends and family have raised over $1,000, which means I have to watch and write about thirty-one horror movies. I’ll watch (on average) one movie a night, many of them requested by donors, after which I’ll write some things about said movies on this website. Be forewarned that all such write-ups will contain spoilers! The latest film in this string of write-ups is Deadly Blessing, by the late, great Wes Craven (A Nightmare on Elm Street, Last House on the Left, Scream). The film was not actually suggested by anyone; it was my first free space! There have only been so many donors who contributed more than $25 to the fundraiser, so I filled in some of the gaps. And since it seemed criminal to have a month’s worth of horror movies with no Wes Craven, I rectified that inequity with a Craven film I had never seen (or really heard of) before. Deadly Blessing was rented from Queen Video. And though Deadly Blessing was not requested by any donors, the manger at Queen Video – a gentleman my friend and I know only as “Movie Bro” – said “I haven’t seen this in years, but I remember loving it,” so I think that counts as an endorsement.

What happens:

A series of still photos of Hittite life opens the film. Deadly Blessing – which is one of the worst types of blessings – is a horror film set within the fictional Hittite farming community. The narrator – there’s a narrator – informs us that the rolling hills of this farming community have protected “a gruesome secret for generations.” The Hittites – a strict religious sect, who one character says make the Amish “look like swingers” – own much of the farmland in this community, tilling the soil in the traditional ways. But there is a more modern farm next door, owned by young couple Jim and Martha Schmidt (Douglas Barr and Maren Jensen). When Jim starts up his John Deere tractor, you can tell from the look on Hittite elder Isaiah’s face that he’s not going to be the Wilson to Jim’s Tim ‘The Toolman’ Taylor.

In another field, a young woman, Faith Stohler (Lisa Hartman) sits, making a terrible painting en plain air. Sneaking up behind the canvas, Hittite William Gluntz (The Hills Have Eyes‘ Michael Berryman) grabs the painting and smashes it against his knee. He yells at her, calling her an “incubus” and chases her around the field. Their chase runs across the path of Jim’s tractor, and he hops off to intervene and defuse the situation. Faith’s mother, Louisa (Lois Nettleton) arrives on the scene. Jim explains what happened and tells her to take it easy on William, who, though large and fairly terrifying, is developmentally delayed and can’t help his outbursts. Louisa is dubious. As the various parties return to their homes, Jim informs Louisa that he might be calling on her help soon: Louisa sometimes works as a midwife, and Martha is pregnant. “I hope it’s a girl,” Louisa jokes. “Boys ain’t nothin’ but trouble.” (What would Will Smith say?)

Isaiah (Ernest Borgnine at his hammiest) and a number of Hittites arrive via buggy to retrieve William. Isaiah’s son, John (Jeff East), waves to Jim. Isaiah roughly pulls John off the buggy by his ear and reminds him the Hittites “have no use for that machinery.” At the end of the day, Jim pulls his John Deere into his barn. William Gluntz is sneaking around the corner. Inside the barn, in bright red paint, someone has painted “INCUBUS.” Jim, exasperated, paints over it with more red. A few houses over, Louisa walks in on her daughter Faith, who is painting yet another weird, distorted landscape in the attic. Louisa is firmly of the mind that “girls should paint their nails, not this stuff,” but Faith won’t be deterred. Her next painting, she assures, will be her masterpiece.

Back at Jim and Martha’s, the happy couple are celebrating their first anniversary. Martha has bought Jim a gift (he forgot to get her anything): a scrapbook from their life together. They flip through it and the audience learns that Jim used to be a Hittite. He left the community and married a woman from the outside world, which got him exiled from Hittite life. Soon, they go to make sweet anniversary love. While they do, someone unseen enters the house, looks in on them in the bedroom, then makes for the scrapbook.

 

Faith just loves painting landscapes from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Unable to sleep, Jim wakes in the middle of the night and paces his porch. He hears the tractor on in the barn, so he arms himself with an axe handle and goes to investigate. Jim finds the tractor is running, but no one is around but some chickens. He turns the tractor off and looks around for who may have started it in the first place. Before he finds anything, the light of the tractor flashes on, blinding him, and the tractor drives forward, crushing Jim against the wall. When Martha awakes and finds no Jim in her bed, she goes to the barn and finds her husband dead.

At Jim’s funeral, Martha opts to stay until the gravedigger is done burying her husband. Five Hittites appear at the edge of the funeral, seemingly in mourning (though it’s hard to tell, as they always dress in black). The gravedigger is bewildered: “They usually do that when one of their own dies.” (He is unaware that Jim used to be one of them.) Meanwhile, two of Martha’s city-slicker friends drive into the farming community in a cherry red convertible. William and a number of Hittite children dare each other to enter the barn where Jim died, which they call “the home of the incubus.” They sneak in the window and gaze upon the murder site, still not cleared. They look at the murder weapon – the tractor – and William touches the blood on the ground.

Martha gets a ride home with her neighbour Louisa, and they talk frankly about being a single woman alone in the farmland, living so close to a conservative religious sect – that kind of thing. A new friendship is forming. But when Martha returns home, she realizes someone has entered her barn. She barges into the barn, furious, and grabs a pitchfork. The kids sneak out the window, but William, too large to join them, hides in the shadows. Martha is then startled at the barn door by her visiting friends, Vicky (Susan Buckner) and Lana (Sharon Stone). Taking advantage of the distraction, William squeezes out the chicken coop entrance, but loses his simple black shoe in the process.

Vicky and Lana, visiting from Los Angeles, discuss Jim’s untimely death with Martha, and ask about the farm. Luckily, Jim owned the farm and left it to Martha in his will. Some back story exposition is outlined, and viewers learn that Jim is also the son of Isaiah, and was shunned by the HIttites when he married a messenger of the incubus (their words, not mine). Vicky asks what an incubus even is, and Martha explains it as a “kind of demon that stalks the faithful in their sleep, or just comes and takes you like a beast!” The two friends decide to stay with Martha for a while, during her period of mourning. Though they may regret it, if the size of the spider Lana spots on the guest bedroom ceiling is any indication.

William, meanwhile, is getting a tongue-lashing for losing his shoe. His father, Matthew Gluntz (Lawrence Montaigne) is very disappointed: “more than the cost of the shoe is the cost of the lie.” He orders William to retrieve his shoe, so William skulks back to Martha’s barn. While he’s there, he decides he can also do some window-peeping, so he spies with his overly wet eyes on Martha undressing for bed through her ground-floor window. A knife flashes and William is grabbed by the throat and stabbed in the back. The next morning, Isaiah and Matthew take their horse and buggy to Martha’s door, seeking Matthew’s missing son. Martha offers to drive William to Matthew’s barn, should she find him. Matthew, extremely thankful, begins to provide his address, so Isaiah has to take him aside and chide him for falling prey to her “glib serpent’s tongue.” He is astonished that Matthew would allow his son in her “ungodly machine.” Isaiah pushes Matthew aside and says he’ll do all the talking here on in.

 

William’s quest for his shoe takes a detour.

Isaiah returns to Martha, waiting patiently on her front porch. He informs her that his son, Jim, would have wanted the land to remain with his people. He is prepared to purchase the deed from Martha. Martha gives her response to his offer in the form of a slammed door and Isaiah loses his cool: “May you burn in hell!” Lana, waking late, recounts an awful nightmare to Vicky and Martha. In it, a gray-skinned man banged on her door and called her by name. She opened the door for him and he transformed into a spider. Vicky cuts her dream story short, partially because nobody cares about other people’s dreams, and partially because they came to cheer Martha up, not scare her. But scare her they do when they open the kitchen curtains to find a face pressed up against the window. Luckily, it’s only Faith, and she’s brought some eggs.

Faith explains to Vicky and Lana that she and her mother are not Hittites; the Hittites tried to run them out of town, in fact. Faith then helps herself to a tour of Martha’s house, lingering in her bedroom. She offers her condolences to Martha, saying she once had a pet bird that died, so she knows how it is. Vicky goes for a jog in the area, running alongside Hittite kids (much to their father’s chagrin) and nearly being attacked by a stray German shepherd. (She maces her way out of that situation.) Eventually, she has a meet-cute with John Schmidt, Isaiah’s other son. John is sorrowful about the death of his brother, and Vicky convinces him to ditch his farm duties and lounge with her in the grass for a while. (I don’t foresee any issues with this.)

John and Vicky make small talk about their different lives. “I feel like I’ve been in a time warp,” Vicky marvels. “What’s a warp?” John asks. John feels like the century he lives in is more peaceful than the modern world, but the rest of Deadly Blessing will probably put that assertion to the test. Before long, Daddy Isaiah shows up and forces John back to work. He won’t even acknowledge Vicky, but eventually deigns to refer to her as a serpent. Isaiah reminds John he should shun all non-Hittite women, and focus on good women like his cousin Melissa (Colleen Riley), to whom he is engaged.

Martha has taken up the bulk of the farm work. The tractor, however, is running a little roughly – maybe something to do with running over a person recently – so she sends Lana to the barn to retrieve her tools. Lana finds the toolbox, but then strange occurrences befall her inside the barn. The door won’t keep open, even when she uses a large rock as a doorstop. Then the clapboards shut on all the windows, plunging Lana into the darkness. The only way out of the barn is up through the loft, but the loft is covered with cobwebs and full of spiders. Suddenly, a figure cloaked in black leaps out at her, sending her hurtling down the wooden steps. The barn door is now open for her escape, but a massive spider has landed on her bosom. Lana swats it away and runs to Martha’s voice outside. That’s when William’s body, hanging by a noose, drops down in front of her.

Still less gross than having to do love scenes with Michael Douglas in Basic Instinct.

Still less gross than having to do love scenes with Michael Douglas in Basic Instinct.

The sheriff arrives to solve the Mystery of the Hanged Hittite, but Isaiah refuses an autopsy. “We already know who did this,” he intones. “The incubus.” The sheriff tells Martha that he’ll get a court order eventually, but advises her she might want to leave town for a spell. Lana, meanwhile, has fallen into shock, so Martha suggests she and Vicky leave. Vicky won’t have it, though, and says they’ll stay at least until the sheriff files a report. Martha draws a bath to decompress. The bathroom fills with steam and she places a damp washcloth over her face so she never sees a figure enter with a burlap sack to release a snake. (Jake the Snake, is that you?) The snake slithers into the tub, a la Shivers, and eventually pops up between her legs. Martha leaps out of the tub, retrieves a fireplace poker and – off-screen – smashes it to bits.

At the Hittite meeting house, Isaiah is on a tear about William’s death. He blames – who else? – that dastardly incubus, but also notes that someone from within their community must have brought William to the barn where he met his death. A box is passed around and one of the Hittite children slides in a note. Isaiah pulls the note from the box and calls the name of “Leopold Smith,” the child who has been outed as the one who dared William to go to the barn in the first place. In front of the entire congregation, Isaiah – Borgnine flashing his eyes like Nicolas Cage – beats his hands with a rattan cane.

Martha and Vicky drive into town for some supplies. Martha has written the snake incident off as just a risk associated with living in a rural area. John, catalogue-shopping in a store for wedding dresses with Melissa, ditches his bride-to-be when he spots Vicky in town. They talk about normal guy-girl things like Jezebel until Melissa catches on that John is making time with the outsider woman. She runs from the store in tears and John chases after her. In a nearby field John grabs her, apologizing profusely. They hold each other so passionately, Melissa’s bonnet pops off, and John starts kissing her hot and heavy. Melissa, realizing this probably falls outside Hittite protocol, freaks out and runs away. Martha, meanwhile, has bought a gun for the farm and they test it out on some bottles and cans.

When Melissa returns to the farm, Isaiah sees her dishevelled state and demands to know “who did this?” He then sees John and puts two and two together. Isaiah brings his son to the barn and commands him to kneel. He fashions a switch and begins to hit him across his back. But then John stops his arm and refuses to submit to more beating. Isaiah is revolted – “You are a stench in the nostril of God!” – and exiles him from the Hittites. “Go to your whore!” he shouts. Back at Martha’s, Vicky leaves to go to the movies and Louisa Stohler drops by to apologize for Faith bothering them. They insist Faith is no bother and Louisa complains about men, saying Faith’s dad left as soon as she was born. “If Faith had been a boy, I would have put her in the river like a sack of kittens,” she says, maybe overdoing it a bit.

John, freshly shunned, hitchhikes into town and loiters outside the movie theatre. Vicky departs her movie moments later and runs directly into him. John explains the blow-up with his dad and Vicky offers him a lift back to the farm. Meanwhile, Lana continues to have troubling dreams. Gray hands appear at the sides of her face as she sleeps and a gravelly voice instructs her to “open her mouth.” A large spider rappels from the ceiling directly into her throat, causing Lana to waken from her nightmare. Lana goes downstairs to tell Martha about the dream – Lana loves discussing her dreams, in case you hadn’t noticed – and realizes Martha is scared, too. Something frightening is happening on this farm.

Vicky, in the interim, has given John the keys to her red convertible, and he is learning to drive the hard way, weaving all over the dirt roads at great speeds to the tune of Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May.” Despite his ringing endorsement of cars – “much better than a horse” – John is not a natural driver, and slips the car out of gear moments before nearly crashing into a tree. He asks Vicky how to start it again and Vicky – real suave – says, “What’s your hurry?” Vicky then puts the moves on her Hittite hottie.

 

I don’t where this masseuse studied, but I don’t think it was accredited.

This romance has not gone unnoticed, however, as Melissa, in her bed at home, wakes with a start and yells, “John!” She goes downstairs to take a ceremonial dagger from her drawer. Back in the convertible, John and Vicky are busy rounding second base when they hear a noise. John insists its a raccoon and leaves the car to scare it away. He returns moments later with no incident. The incident happens seconds later, when they pick up where they left off and knife stabs through the soft top of the car, nearly killing Vicky. John covers Vicky with his body and is stabbed repeatedly in the back for his heroism. The unseen assailant then begins to douse the car in gasoline. Vicky desperately tries to start the ignition, but the killer has already lit a match. Vicky starts the car just as the flames start to chase her car. She nearly outruns the flames but runs into a rut and, “Karma Police” style, is drowned in fire.

Back at Martha’s farm, Lana offers to make her friend a PB & J. But when she pours a glass of milk, she discovers the carton is full of blood. Lana promptly drops the glass and bugs out. She becomes convinced that Death is after them, and there’s no way they’ll be able to stop Him. Martha goes to her bedroom and when she opens the door, a booby-trapped Hittite scarecrow pops out at her. Taking the flower from the scarecrow’s lapel, she whispers “Jim.” She travels to the cemetery and finds her husband’s grave unearthed, the flowers missing. Instead, two bullets are resting by the open pit. She enters the grave and opens the coffin. Instead of her dead husband, she finds several chickens, angry at being cooped up. She runs to the Stohlers’ barn and discovers a painting – a Faith Stohler original – that appears to depict her as some kind of space goddess. She also finds Faith’s reference material: her and Jim’s wedding photo from the scrapbook. Worse, she turns around and finds Jim’s corpse, strung up in the barn like a marionette!

Melissa, meanwhile, is walking across the Stohlers’ lawn, her dagger outstretched, her mouth reciting the words of some sort of protection prayer. Martha spots her, then sees Louisa walk out her front door to immediately start choking Melissa. Martha cries out to stop Louisa when Faith attacks her from behind. Faith and Martha struggle, with Faith screaming, “Why are you keeping us apart, Martha?!” When Martha hits Faith with a rock, Faith falls backward, popping her shirt open, revealing the type of hairy chest usually associated with a man. Martha flees from the scene.

Faith rouses awake and argues with her mother, saying she’s tired of pretending to be a girl. She accuses Louisa of attempting to kill Martha with the snake. Clearly, Faith has become obsessed with Martha. Louisa, in her extreme dislike of men, raised her son as a woman, and that son only recently began acting out when he started to lust after the next-door neighbour. Inside, Martha grabs the panicky Lana so they can make their escape, but there’s a knock at the locked door. They hide, but a shotgun blasts open a hole in the door and Louisa’s hand slips through, trying to unlock the door. Martha uses her pistol to keep Louisa’s hand away. She then takes Lana and they retreat to the telephone to call for help. That’s when Faith smashes through the window to attack. Martha shoots her without much of a second thought. Louisa then leaps in with a shotgun and chases Martha up the stairs.

Louisa catches up to Martha in the guest bedroom and they battle on the floor. Martha strikes with Vicky’s mace. Louisa attacks Martha with a bedpost, but Lana – surprising everyone – rushes in at the last moment with Martha’s gun and shoots Louisa to death. Martha then returns downstairs and spots a blood trail from where Faith was shot. Faith is still alive! She leaps out with a knife, so it’s up to Melissa, who runs in out of nowhere and stabs Faith through the chest. Melissa turns to Martha and Isaiah enters the front door and declares, “the messenger of the incubus is dead.” (Thanks for showing up, Isaiah.)

In the denouement, the sheriff drives Lana to a bus station (we can assume) and Martha returns to her home alone. As soon as she walks in the front door, however, the room falls dark and the ghost of Jim appears, covered in blood. He warns Martha to “beware the incubus,” which is weird because Isaiah pretty much just told us all the threat was over. But what does Isaiah know? The room suddenly starts shaking and a literal demon – claws and fangs and all – shoots up from the floorboards and drags Martha down to hell. The End. (Wait, what?)

 

You know what they say: once you go Pennsylvania Dutch, you never go back.

Takeaway points:

  • The Hittites, the agrarian religious sect featured in Deadly Blessing, are completely fictional, though quite obviously modelled on the Amish, even down to the notions of exile and shunning. And, as it turns out, they’re also a bit of a red herring. Though they are not fond of outsiders and pretty horrible to women – labelling them all serpents and messengers of the incubus and whatnot – they’re not, as it turns out, killers. (Though we never really find out who murdered Vicky and John. That could have been Melissa.) I should also note that Deadly Blessing predates Amish pop-culture touchstone Witness by a few years.
  • Deadly Blessing is one of the many films included in a genre we might title “trans horror.” That is, slasher movies in which the killer is revealed to be a different sex than he/she presents him/herself, and – in fact – their gender “confusion” is usually the source of their homicidal tendencies. Sleepaway Camp is the most notable of these “trans horror” films, though Deadly Blessing was released a couple years earlier, as were many Italian gialli with a similar reveal. The ending is telegraphed from the beginning if you pay attention: William refers to Faith as an “incubus,” a male demon, even though she presents as female. Though the gender reveal makes for a good twist ending, I can’t help but lament the untold difficulties it must have caused (and continues to cause) the trans community. Imagine growing up trans in the 1980s, when every horror movie that features a trans character presents them as a monster, so confused about their gender, they’re driven to murder. When, in fact, the reveal that this character was born another gender is the horror itself. You can read a way more intelligent essay about horror and transphobia by Willow Marclay at Cleo Journal here.
  • I can’t quite figure out the imagery of spiders that runs throughout Deadly Blessing. The use of the snake in the tub makes sense: there’s all sorts of religious imagery regarding asps and serpents in the Bible. Some is explicitly referenced by Isaiah. But not so much spiders. Spiders do come up often in the talks of Puritan preachers like Jonathan Edwards (who famously compared people to spiders that God dangles over the flames of Hell), so the imagery is fitting for a movie about Puritan-esque farmers. But I think it’s more likely that Wes Craven just thinks spiders are scary.
  • Much more than his earlier films, Deadly Blessing betrays a giallo influence. The killer is a mystery to the end, which was not the case of, say, The Hills Have Eyes or Last House on the Left, where the baddies were obvious the moment they’re seen. Likewise, there’s an unnatural interest in black leather gloves, flashing knives, and weird paintings, as there is in many of the Italian predecessors to slasher movies.
  • One aspect of Deadly Blessing that I felt could be further explored was the horror of Jim and Martha living next door to Jim’s father, Isaiah, who just happens to be the corporal-punishment-happy leader of an ultra-strict Amish-like group. At points, the movie read like a horror version of Everybody Loves Raymond.

Truly terrifying or truly terrible?: Deadly Blessing is not a particularly scary movie, nor a particularly good one. It’s certainly not one of Wes Craven’s best. Perhaps if you were afraid of spiders or snakes you might have a few nightmares from this one. (Indiana Jones, do not watch this.)

 

Martha cowgirls up.

Best outfit: The Hittites tend to stay in basic black. But Martha, Vicky, and Lana wear some pretty excellent fashions. If I had to choose one winner, I’d go with Martha’s blue cowgirl look, complete with string tie.

Best line: “She’s so dumb, she couldn’t pour piss from a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel.” – Louisa, proud mother, on her daughter Faith

Best kill: The suspense-filled lead-up to Vicky’s in-car immolation was the best kill by far. Deadly Blessing is short on gore, but that scene wasn’t short on intensity.

Unexpected cameo: Obviously a very young Sharon Stone as Lana Marcus is a pretty good find. She even eats a spider! Jeff East, who plays John Schmidt, is probably best known for playing a young Clark Kent in the original Superman movie. And this film marked the last acting role for Maren Jensen, who you may recognize as Athena from the original Battlestar Galactica show. She contracted Epstein-Barr Syndrome shortly after filming this, and didn’t return to acting after she recovered.

Unexpected lesson(s) learned: Don’t store your chickens in a coffin.

Most suitable band name derived from the movie: Brimstones for Breakfast

Next up: The House with the Laughing Windows (1976).