SUPERSTITION
aka The Witch
It's Halloween again, and for our 12th annual Switcheroo with Brennan Klein of Popcorn Culture, we're doing what we always do this time of year when we turn the tables on one another: he takes over my Cardboard Science feature and reviews some of those corny mid-century sci-fi movies, and I do some fieldwork for Brennan's Census Bloodbath, as he gives me a slate of sick 80s slasher flicks from his ever-expanding encyclopedia of death. This year we're back to full power, with three psyche-scarring films of Brennan's selection.
1985
Directed by James W. Roberson
Written by Michael O. Sajbel, Bret Thompson Plate, Brad White, and Donald G. Thompson
There's a tendency—at least that I have, but I think most horror fans have—to put up walls around any given movie, to determine what kind of horror it is. This can be useful as a matter of historical taxonomy, or simply to efficiently convey what a movie's about, and whether you're in the mood for its brand of chills: is this movie a slasher? is it a haunted house movie? a witchcraft movie? a horrorfied police procedural? an Exorcist knock-off? And so forth. Of course there's sometimes—in fact quite often—a significant bleedover, as it were, between all the different forms that horror can take. But sometimes a movie doesn't demonstrate it knows there's supposed to be any walls there at all, and that's where we find Superstition, a movie that more-or-less does work, as a matter of plot mechanics, but is still a total mess of different concepts and, indeed, approaches to those concepts, a collision of at least three different movies revolving around a resurrected (or, really, never-entirely-killed) evil witch, as if its three scenarists and one screenwriter (only Donald G. Thompson is credited with the screenplay) were reluctant to choose any particular story, or one single protagonist, to which they might have attached that notion, though it was understood that, structurally-speaking, they were going to make a slasher out of it no matter what, in order to justify the kills that were always, slightly reductively but not inaccurately, the justification for their movie. Hence Superstition, a movie about the undead remnant of a 17th century witch that kicks off with a severed head exploding in a microwave, because that's such a natural pairing.
Points for creativity, anyway—produced in 1981 or 1982, it was well ahead of the slasher's reorientation towards the overt supernatural that Nightmare On Elm Street wrought, and I'm not sure I could name another pre-Nightmare slasher that does bank this hard on a supernatural conceit—but that creativity wasn't going to be richly rewarded. Though a Canadian production—albeit shot in Southern California (I can only confidently declare it's set on North America's eastern seaboard)—Superstition didn't arrive in Canada's southern neighbor for years. It got a 1982 release in its homeland, as well as in Italy (which checks out, since for a Canadian slasher, it can sure feel like it's taking its cues from Italy), along with a few other territories. Over its years of international release, it bounced back and forth, apparently randomly, between the titles Superstition and The Witch (for instance, in Venezuela, it was Superstición, but in Colombia, it was La Bruja) all the while languishing without stateside distribution until a minor American release in 1985, and then to video (in the United Kingdom it was made contraband as one of the lower-ranked Section 3 video nasties), after which it sank into semi-obscurity with no particular revival afterwards even if Superstition, like a great many ephemeral horror films, made its way onto blu-ray. For his part, director Mark Roberson went back to his day job of being a cinematographer—he'd previously shot The Town That Dreaded Sundown—and mainly for television, though he still has a few subsequent theatrical DP credits you'd have heard of (and precisely two directorial credits, that you wouldn't).
I will not assert that any of this was some outrageous miscarriage of justice, but Roberson's movie's alright enough. So: we begin where horror so often does, with a pair of teens (Nova Ball and Morgan Strickland, I think) necking in a car, in this case parked in the drive of an ancient, decaying abandoned mansion (frankly, it looks more like a hotel built no earlier than the 1950s). The house's haunted reputation has put the heebie-jeebies into his date, averring that she'd like to fuck, but not here. Her fears seem to be confirmed when a jumpscare sends them both off into panicked flight; but it's just old Arty (Bennett James) and Charlie (Johnny Doran), screwing around. However, and in case you're locked into your interpretation of every last slasher film as a metaphorical punishment for sex, this time our first victims are the prankster jerks who got in sex's way, and now Charlie, separated from his friend, searches the dilapidated mansion vainly calling his name—the word "Arty" may have more prominence in this screenplay than the word "the," and he stopped being in the movie at all sixty seconds ago—wandering through the piles of junk that have accumulated until he finds a pile with a microwave oven on top, and it's running. The door flies open—through no human intervention—and there Arty's head is, for a moment, before the boiling water in the center of it forces its way through and the entire skull pops, very much like a balloon. Charlie doesn't live much longer, for as he runs from some force and attempts escape through the window, he's sliced in half by its phantasmic power.
Now, this is kind of the best Superstition is ever going to get, which I don't necessarily mean as a slam (and a screenplay that's four pages of "Charlie: Arty! Arty! Arty! Arty! Hey, Arty! Arty?" perhaps militates against this truly being Superstition's "best"), but it might not ever function better even though it's telling you what it's going to be doing throughout: its best kill, or at least its best body-disposal gag (Arty died by offscreen decapitation, after all), is a stupid magic trick with grand guignol inflections that, nevertheless, is taking full advantage of the no-rules supernatural possibilities of the premise, and the movie will essentially be a series of stupid magic trick grand guignol kills, for better and worse, even after it's introduced our real cast and developed "a story" for them to take part in; and it's a lot of stalking suspensefully through a dark house, and even if that's going to vary from sequence-to-sequence and shot-to-shot in its artfulness, that still feels like a good choice for a cinematographer who's making a horror movie, especially if he's shooting and lighting it himself (known for literally nothing besides this film, I don't believe Superstition's credited cinematographer "Leon Blank" is actually real); and it's going to be giving composer David Gibney a huge amount of aural canvas to work with, and the blank space will drive him a little nuts, so that from any given minute-long stretch, particularly from the funky electronic terror of the opening, you'd be willing to call it a "good score," but it's swinging all over the place, the sole fixed idea Gibney seems to have being to knock off The Shining, so thoroughly that Wendy Carlos's tones work their way into a hymn, but constantly throwing out new cues, some of which aren't wholly-suited to supernatural horror, for instance the 8-bit cover of Tom Petty's "American Girl."
Well, now with another pair of corpses on their hands—hardly the first—the cops, principally Inspector Sturgess (Albert Sami), finally make their concerns known to the property's owners, who happen to be the (or at least a) church. The churchmen aren't thrilled about the deaths, but they've got their own problems, mainly a changeover in personnel that's brought in one brand-new cleric, young David Thompson (James Houghton, and I will hear no arguments that James Marsden didn't accidentally fall into a hair-bleaching time-hole), to run the parish alongside another, George Leahy (Larry Pennell), and they'd already arranged for the latter, a drunk with a family, to use the mansion as temporary accommodations. This at least means that Thompson is intent on having the place cleaned out and fixed up, which is sufficient to satisfy Sturgess for now, and they both go out there whilst David explains the church's relationship to the property, which is that they're obliged to provide (apparently in an outbuilding) living quarters for the descendants of the original owner's servants, presently numbering only two, Elvira Sharack (Jacquelyn Hyde) and her mute, not-all-there son Arlen (Joshua Cadman). Sturgess's suspicion begins to gravitate towards Arlen, and all the more when his partner Jack (Casey Hollister) drowns in the lake. Elvira, a little witchy herself, avers that that's only the work of the ghost that haunts this property. We know she's right because we saw the cop get pulled in by her reptilian, clawed hand, evidently the form a witch takes when she's been underwater for four centuries.
Elvira eventually lays out the rules that the spirit's been bound by—during the daytime, her power is limited to the lake, but at night there aren't any rules—though as she's only mentioning this after a certain old cross has been retrieved alongside that cop's body, she adds that the holy relic was the only thing holding the witch back at all, so daylight isn't safe anymore either. In the midst of this, the Leahys move in—George, his wife Melinda (Lynn Carlin), his daughters Sheryl and Ann (Maylo McCaslin and Heidi Bohay), and young son Justin (Billy Jayne). Some inexplicable deaths of tertiary cast members ensue, some of which are witnessed (watch out for that circular saw, Reverend Maier! (Stacey Keach Sr)), and some of which occur without any bystanders, all of which could be accidents, until Justin seemingly vanishes while playing in the basement. Now everybody realizes something's happening, and everybody pursues their own theory of the case: Sturgess decides that the inconsistent dimensions of the house means Arlen has a hidden room, and spends the rest of the movie poking at walls; David slowly comprehends the supernatural complexion of his adversary and ventures to the neighboring/overlapping parish to research the history of this demonic plat; and George goes virtually catatonic, rarely even rousing himself into an upright stance.
A lot going on, and, like I said, more like several different movies competing with one another, even though only one of them "matters" (David's dipshit paranormal investigation), and only one more feels like it dovetails with that (the haunted house story with the Leahys), whereas the remaining one is clearly just off doing its own thing and pointlessly eating runtime (Sturgess's police investigation). Still, David's and Stugesses's plots at least occasionally interact with one another and with the lore dumps provided by the requisite creepy crone; and, technically, all of them get tied together eventually with a big flashback to colonial times, wherein we witness a "progressive" priest balk at the purification of a witch by fire—too cruel!—so Elondra Sharak (this isn't that important; Carole Goodman) is only drowned instead, which turns out to be a mistake, since she's probably worse as a freshwater revenant than she was as a living witch.
I'd like to dwell on a little rankling thing that distracted me the whole movie, however: besides not being able to pin this down to a place, which admittedly isn't very crucial, I'm not sure that either Roberson or Thompson—that is, Donald Thompson, the screenwriter who stamped his own initials onto the protagonist like he was James Cameron (and for this protagonist?)—know, or much care, exactly what religion their characters are supposed to be, which isn't unsupportably crucial, though it's obviously annoying in the context of a cast that's 80% clergy or family of clergy. I think they might think they're Catholic, but they're not. Thompson patently doesn't know how the title "reverend" formally works for any church, but nobody would refer to Catholic priests that way; likewise, David's research takes him to an affirmatively Catholic parish, which feels like an ecumenical field trip. Then again, David's church owns the lake a bunch of Catholics, armed with a cross from Rome (which they consider a good thing), drowned a witch in (so it's also a witch-slaying by Catholics in the New World, which I'm not sure ever happened). Most of all, Sturgess notices "Reverend" David Thompson noticing the Leahy nubiles, and remarks that he's always wondered about the sex drives of men of the cloth, and I expected David to retort something along the lines of "We're Protestants, you fucking moron," but he doesn't. (And along the lines of a completely-tangential observation, Roberson is noticing those nubiles, too, and inviting you to do the same, but not too unsubtly—by 1982 standards, anyhow; by 2025 standards, it's intoxicating in-your-face eroticism—simply placing the camera a little low, so we can understand the insufficiencies of their gym shorts as clothing, to the point of becoming familiar with the contours of their vulvas. Following this, though, we get one of the showiest pieces of camera direction in the entire motion picture, a dolly-out from the window that moves past Carlin at the exactly right time for her to thrust her tits straight through her white shirt, and as you don't get a ton of slobbering over 44 year olds in slasher flicks, I don't know, I daresay it almost comes off generous.)
Anyway, maybe let's just call it "Maryland," with its history of overlapping religions (or southern Newfoundland), though I've belabored it because I think it's as good an indication as, well, anything else about this narrative that it's just not a story that any of its four writers cared much about beyond its capacity to motivate a kill every ten or so minutes—so, you know, it is a slasher, though this becomes a problem because it's such an overcomplicated slasher, that's required to be all sorts of other things, and somehow every single one of its plot threads has the ability to make it feel like we've cut away from something more interesting and diligently-pursued, even though we haven't. That's almost objectively the case in the "haunted house" phase of the film: it's downright bizarre to see the family that's occupied the haunted house get moved to basically the furthest possible margins of a story that would usually at least be somewhat about them, yet for a while the most Roberson even does with them is a hellaciously-misjudged hallucination montage that mostly just blends together kill scenes, mostly no more than thirty minutes old. Belatedly, Thompson starts rushing to make "characters" out of them, through the expedient (but inadequate) mechanism of giving the daughters conflict viz. their respective evaluations of their loser father, and dialogue like "Shut your bitchy mouth," not even delivered as well by McCaslin as you'd already guess from its content.
Still, that story, even with all its too-many parts akimbo, does manage what Roberson asks of it, and despite the perpetual sensation that we're always stuck looking at the most boring part of it, it works on the basic spookshow level of bringing us to a climax where that witch has manifested her power in full and our surviving cast (most of the principals, but, boy, not quite all) come under direct attack by her overwhelming supernatural force. Throughout, it's never been too terribly far away from a wacky kill to renew your excitement (that circular saw continuing to spin through that dude's chest and out the back of his chair is wondrous), but it turns out it's been biding its time for what's pretty much just a straight-up good finale, as David marshals the power of Christ, or at least a ridiculously large salvaged crucifix, against this evil witch (he also deploys that crucifix as what amounts to a mystical keycard, and this isn't as completely stupid as it sounds, although it sure prompts the giddiest exercises in pyrotechnics in the film, too).
But, no, I don't think I'd qualify it much at all: I don't suppose it can be scary, but Roberson is putting together some outstanding imagery to sell his witch as an almost unstoppable force, a monstrous apparition almost always backlit by spotlit moonlight as it towers over its enemies in triumph. It drags back in the "creepy little girl" haunted house element, that wasn't important enough to previously mention, but it does so pretty nastily, and such nastiness goes for everything here in Superstition's final act. It's a mean little horror movie, meaner even than most slashers wind up, and I'll consider that a point in its favor.
Killer: Elondra Shakar
Final Girl: David
Sign of the Times: An apparent desire to rip off Black Sunday and The Exorcist simultaneously had to take the form of a slasher film; alternatively, David's fighting-priest-who-can-talk-to-the-youth hippie van
Best Kill: Hard to deny a 'splodin noggin in a microwave
Scariest Moment: Justin drops a glass of milk in the basement, giving him sufficient pause to notice the blood now dripping into it from above him
Weirdest Moment: When Sturgess's partner puts himself in a position to be pulled into the lake by the witch, he's done so in order to retrieve this:
Champion Dialogue: "Those are the Reverend Leahy's daughters." "No doubt born without bottoms."
Body Count: 13
1. Arty, decapitated and nuked
2. Charlie, sliced in twain
3. Jack, drowned, and, going by later revelations, apparently dismembered underwater
4: Father Reverend Maier is sitting in a chair when a circular saw flies off its moorings, across the entire room, into him, and through him
5. A construction worked is hanged by elevator cables
6. Justin is killed offscreen, but eventually flung at one of his relatives
7. The colonial times priest (Robert Symonds) is telekinetically crushed in a wine press
8. Sturgess dies somehow
9. Melinda is thrown around like a ragdoll, and succumbs to those injuries offscreen
10. George is attacked by the pieces of a disintegrating mirror
11. Cheryl is staked through the head
12. (and this is where we really start getting mean) Ann is killed offscreen, but despite seemingly having escaped already
13. Likewise, David, who believes he's exorcised the demon, at last, with fire, but the witch pulls him in to his doom anyway
TL;DR: Just an unruly pileup of stuff for a slasher movie (or "even for a slasher movie"), but most of it's somewhat fun, and the finale is just rock-solid supernatural horror, no notes
Score: 6/10
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