Ah 1966, what an excellent year for an exorcism. Flip the 9 and you got the beast's number. Still two years off from ROSEMARY'S BABY, '66 contains INCUBUS and EYE OF THE DEVIL instead, one similar to Rosemary's daily life and the other one to her dream, if it as in Esperanto. 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, and reality. 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 stretched through time to snatch her at the prime two-souls-in-one moment. But they're crazy, right?
The many weird rumors of strange accidents and Satanic coincidences during ROSEMARY's production originated, some say, with ballyhoo maestro William Castle. 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.
That's where it gets super tricky, these pagan devil movies, as black magic and Satanism work in a much more fatalistic way than the sacrifice-free Christianity. With Satan there's a gruesome payoff where the subject learns he's "always been the caretaker," and that "out of all the women who ever lived on earth, he chose you! Hail Satan!" and so forth. Is there free will, Father? Maybe the one who has 'always been the caretaker' can play Christian the way a closeted gay guy plays straight, i.e. stunting his own potential and becoming far less than he was meant to be, or he can let go of the handrails and let the Satan's magnet pull him inexorably towards 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 her 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) 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, is just asking for trouble.
I mention all this because without Sharon Tate EYE OF THE DEVIL is a bore. It draws you in tight like that beetle tied to a string in the middle of the school desk in WICKER MAN, but then lets you go home uncrushed. But Tate's fate-and-sorrow drenched story lends it the same eerie black magic ballyhoo synchronicity echo ROSEMARY and THE EXORCIST have, so in its way EYE OF THE DEVIL is the Virgin Mary that would beget Rosemary Woodhouse and Regan MacNeil, as they in turn would beget a period of widespread ouija board abuse. So EYE could be said then, to be an evil influence.
It's still a bore though, with Deborah Kerr's nosey parker chasing after stricken marquis David Niven whose being prepared for some diabolical festival. He says please, babe, stop crowding me!
She won't, and so his desire for the black abyss is made understandable. A typical moment is when she's outraged over David Hemmings shooting down a white dove with his little bow and arrow. Then 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 Jessica Biel in the 2003 remake of TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (see my op here), going into weird backwaters uninvited to harass the locals like a mutton-headed missionary enforcing a hypocritically "Christian" concept of law and order. 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 to worship Satan is I see fit.
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 haunted archery teacher? Nein!
Rosemary Woodhouse was a real cool chick, a little naive maybe but it was the style of the time. Deborah Kerr's character in EYE is a stone bummer. And that is the difference.
Playing a kind of unwittingly dosed Mary Poppins struggling through the shadows for a ghost Marlon Brando in THE INNOCENTS, Kerr carried the horror of that film on her shoulders, while in DEVIL she drops it on the floor and starts lecturing. 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. 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.
She could fathom the ghosts in INNOCENTS because there was no living man to defer to, but here she's like IMITATION OF LIFE's Annie Johnson trying to grab her Sarah Jane from trying to pass in death's cold marble nightclub. Everyone else but her 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 whole film playing a buzz-kill. 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!
EYES thinks, or was forced to think by the censors, that the camera should do what's right and follow mom back upstairs. Tt's very British to think that censorial inhibitions are the stuff riveting devil movies are made of. They probably would have loved ALMOST FAMOUS and hated OVER THE EDGE.
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 than the new wavy 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 in 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.
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, INCBUS would make a good double bill with NIGHT TIDE. The Esperanto angle adds just the right final dash of weirdness to the story of a succubus hanging around a healing spring in Big Sur, driving 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 unleash the Incubus of the good soul's equally good (i.e. virginal) sister!
This would actually make a good 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 but with South American public school girl smocks, William Shatner playing 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 Satanic blonde feeling sexually violated because Kirk brought her to church? Senpreza!
In the end, INCUBUS and EYE OF THE DEVIL have a lot in common, fault-wise: EYE is way too dry, with way too much Kerr and not nearly enough Tate (she looks amazing, takes a whipping in stride, and delivers some great wicked lines with the sex-ice authority of an evil Emma Peel); INCUBUS is way too much the other way around, it's too eager to be Bergman and not eager enough to be Corman, which is what it is, so it should appreciate that and just go for it, and the print they show on TCM is far too blurry for any scintillation off Big Sur's dramatic coastline.
But both also share a unique ambiguity about which 'side' they're on. There's an association of good with boring and safe. 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, 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 nth 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!
