THE BAD SEED 1956

* Spoiler Alert! Major plot points are divulged for critical discussion and analysis.

For the most part, I don't see anything inherently wrong in a film morphing from one kind of entertainment into another over the course of its "screening life." By this, I mean movies—a populist entertainment /art form presumed of a certain marketable topicality at the time of their release, are, by nature, vulnerable to the vagaries of time. A movie can start out as one kind of entertainment...say, thoughtful social drama...but, due to changing public tastes, evolve into something that gives pleasure to countless hundreds in new, totally unexpected ways (i.e., unintentional humor or high camp).

Rhoda Has Intimacy Issues

Some movies, like John Huston's The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948) and George Stevens' A Place in the Sun (1951), feel as powerful today as I imagine when first released. Then there are those movies dismissed or misunderstood in their own time (Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter) that receive the benefit of revisionist reassessment.  

But occasionally, a movie just seems to take its place in our collective consciousness as a work superficially cloaked in the trappings of its time. Though they may be about such timeless human issues as love, death, survival, and hope, the matter in which those issues are addressed can brand the film as hopelessly dated. 

For Adults Only - No One Will Be Seated During the Last 15 minutes
A "Catch Your Breath" Intermission at Each Screening!

One of the earliest legit films to actively advertise itself as suitable for "Adults Only," The Bad Seed was taken to task for what many perceived to be its sensationalist and misleading ad campaign. Criticism was leveled at the film's advertising copy and graphics that hinted at sexual impropriety being at the core of the film's big secret ("The most terrifying rock-bottom a woman ever hit for love!").

Not surprisingly, the type of movies most susceptible to becoming relics of their time are those most determined to be daringly up-to-date upon release. A surefire recipe for instant obsolescence is to take over-emphatic, up-to-the-minute immediacy, multiply it by sensationalism, and add a dash of self-seriousness. The result is usually something so mired in a particular time, place, and mindset that it becomes near-impossible to take seriously in any of the ways originally intended. 

The Bad Seed's roots in old-fashioned theater are reinforced by its often stagy blocking  

When psychoanalysis was new, juvenile delinquency in its infancy, and post-war conformity at its height, Maxwell Anderson's Broadway 1954 play The Bad Seed (adapted from the 1954 novel by William March) must have been quite the eye-opener. A thriller about a sociopathic 8-year-old serial killer sounds like a weed among the roses in a Broadway season that saw the premieres of Peter Pan and The Pajama Game. But the chillingly original premise and, by all accounts, remarkable performance of little 9-year-old anti-Shirley Temple, Patty McCormack, made The Bad Seed into a solid hit. Co-star Nancy Kelly won the Tony Award for Best Actress that year. And in a rarity for Hollywood, virtually the entire principal cast of the play was recruited to recreate their roles for the 1956 film adaptation.

Nancy Kelly as Christine Penmark

Patty McCormack as Rhoda Penmark

Eileen Heckart as Hortense Daigle

But not everything that plays well across the footlights survives the magnification of the movie screen. Suffering from a perhaps too-faithful adaptation that had characters standing around talking for fitfully long stretches while engaged in a lot of theatrically fussy "stage business." The combination of the minimal action and close-up lens trained on The Bad Seed only served to amplify the dubious premise of its plot (hereditary homicidal tendencies) while failing to add much in the way of either verisimilitude or spontaneity to the progressively melodramatic proceedings.

Henry Jones as Leroy Jessup

Evelyn Varden as Monica Breedlove

William Hopper as Kenneth Penmark

Navy Colonel Kenneth Penmark and wife Christine seem to have the ideal child in their little Rhoda: an angelic, near-perfect package of pigtails and ruffles, blessed with girlish grace and good manners. But, when Kenneth is called away to Washington for business, Christine (who appears to be wound a little tight from the get-go) begins to suspect that Rhoda's immaculate façade isn't perhaps masking a more disturbed, darker personality dysfunction. The mysterious death of a local schoolboy and Christine's epiphanic discovery of her birth lineage lead her to believe that little Rhoda might be a budding serial killer: a possessor of a hereditary "bad seed" gene passed on to Rhoda by Christine herself. What to do? What to do? What to do?

Al Hirschfeld

I make light of the preposterous-sounding premise, but quite honestly, when removed from the gimmicky "serial killer gene" plotline, The Bad Seed is pretty solid thriller material. It might have even tapped into the post-war/ McCarthy-era "banality of evil" zeitgeist of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (released the same year) had it managed to sidestep the theatrical histrionics and showed more faith in presenting a dark vision of idealized suburban perfection.

The Torment of Truth

Paul Fix as Christine's father, Richard Bravo
-telling her she might want to table those plans for a family reunion-

The Bad Seed was a sensation on stage, but almost too much for the screen. The play's original twist ending had to be retooled so that evil didn't prevail, plus a tacked-on coda was introduced that had the entire cast return (even those who didn't survive) to give the screen equivalent of a curtain call bow. When I was a kid and The Bad Seed scared me senseless, this "See, it's only make-believe!" addition did what it was supposed to do; save the film from being too disturbing and grim.  

As an adult, that silly roll call ending just feels like such an odd choice, the way it wrenches you out of the drama before you're even ready.

Topically The Bad Seed benefits from the uniqueness of its narrative perspective. Though horror movie screens overflow with little monsters now, I can't readily think of another film before this that dared deal with the topic of a child being capable of murder. Despite this novelty, The Bad Seed is ill-served by how deeply the plot (and far too much of its dialogue) is entrenched in then-novel, now-outmoded Freudian psychological theorems. As a result, a great deal of emotional drama gets submerged beneath reams of expository dialogue. And while the suspense and tension are generally well-handled, its overall effectiveness is undermined by some of the performances' overwrought and overrehearsed theatricality. 

Joan Croydon as Miss Claudia Fern 
Clearly, Miss Fern already harbors suspicions about Rhoda.
But isn't that always the way...the parents are
always the last to know their kid's a homicidal maniac

I couldn't have been much older than Rhoda when I first saw The Bad Seed on TV (which is also likely the last time I ever took the film seriously), and I recall it being quite the shake-up experience. I was raised in a middle-class neighborhood where kids were brought up to be seen and not heard. To be obedient and polite, to say "Please" and "Thank you," and to never, but NEVER speak back to grownups. So it shocked the hell out of me to see a little girl who could have stepped out of an episode of Father Knows Best or Leave it to Beaver behaving so monstrously. The idea that a kid could exert any power over their own lives at all was alien enough, let alone plan and carry out vicious murders with nary a trace of remorse.

Jess White as Emry Wages / Gage Clark as Reginald Tasker

Although I was a fan of horror movies as a kid and loved to be scared, I must say I didn't mind that the deaths of little Claude Daigle or handyman Leroy were never shown in The Bad Seed. My fertile imagination furnished all the gory details. I remember being very torn up by the grief of Eileen Heckart's Mrs. Daigle, and the sound of the gunshot near the end nearly sent me flying off the sofa. My strongest memory is of Rhoda's final trip to the boathouse. It was spooky enough that she was out alone at night in a rainstorm, but I thought maybe her maddeningly clueless father would wake up and catch her red-handed with the medal. That bolt of lightning hit me like ...well, a bolt of lightning. OMG! I had NEVER seen a kid killed in a movie before, and that image stayed with me for many a nightmare.

Frank Cady as Henry Daigle 
A medal should be awarded to anyone who can see this actor and not think of General Store owner
Sam Drucker of Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Petticoat Junction. I certainly can't.

Youth and naiveté definitely have their advantages with some movies, so at least I get to say that I had one pure, unironic experience of The Bad Seed before the unintentional laughs set in and The Bad Seed, almost imperceptibly, went from serious to hilarious in my eyes.

Granted, the film's pitch had always been a little high, but with maturity, the passing of time, and changing tastes, The Bad Seed started to look as dated and reactionary as one of those "social guidance" films of the '50s and '60s. 

The patent phoniness of Rhoda's "good little girl" act is so obvious it instantly brands the adults in the film as idiots. However, it also simultaneously turns Leroy into the film's clear-eyed hero and the collective voice of the viewing audience. Happily, the gradual inability to take The Bad Seed seriously only made the film more watchable, not less.

"Have you been naughty?"

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

In real life, it takes little effort for me to see most children as monsters. But making them look menacing on the screen is extremely difficult. The 1976 film The Omen neatly sidestepped the pitfall the wan 2006 remake fell into (headfirst) by framing the action in ways that left the child's evil nature ambiguous. In the original film, the child behaves normally, leaving the audience to project whatever it wanted onto his angelic, inexpressive pan. In the remake, someone got the bright idea to have the child actor perpetually scowl and glower into the camera...the result being the surely-unwanted effect of making it look like little Damien is perpetually suffering from a devil of a tummy ache. What makes Patty McCormack so memorably creepy in The Bad Seed is that she's like a schoolyard bully dreamt up by Murder, Inc.

The only reason this scene gets laughs is that Patty McCormack is scarier than hell in it. Who'd ever think a little girl in pigtails and a pinafore could make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up?

These days, when the bratty behavior of children is endorsed, encouraged, and regarded as business-as-usual in every sitcom and movie comedy, I wonder if a film like The Bad Seed would even work today. Indeed, the superb thriller We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) is an excellent example of how a "bad seed" scenario can be handled in a serious and dramatically compelling way. 

But Rhoda Penmark is both a product of her time and a victim of it. 

The ladylike decorum expected of little girls in the '50s is so passe, everything about Rhoda comes across as anachronistically comic, severely undercutting her intended menace. In movies today, little girls who look like Rhoda Penmark are the victims of girls who look like Wednesday Addams. 

Monica Breedlove, the Freudian landlord, is a particular favorite of mine.

The gift that keeps on giving when I watch The Bad Seed now is that Rhoda's brattishness calls to mind so many pop-culture icons of bad behavior...like Neely O'Hara and Alexis Carrington. Her outbursts and threats make me giggle, not just because one doesn't expect such malevolence coming out of a child kitted out to resemble a Chatty Cathy doll, but also because she's carrying on in a way we've long come to associate with grown-up entertainment industry brats and divas. Rhoda is rude, ruthless, selfish, self-involved, single-mindedly determined to get what she wants, and impervious to the suffering of others. I'm thinkin' Madonna or Kanye West.

The Original Material Girl

PERFORMANCES

Nancy Kelly and Eileen Heckart give the kind of robust, herculean performances that usually garner Oscar nominations, and indeed both (along with McCormack) were, in fact, nominated for Academy Awards. Both are really very good, though neither actress lets up "acting" for even a second. Kelly's stylistic excesses and singsong way of conveying sincerity may induce laughter, but her character's anguish is really affectingly played. Heckart has some great material to work with, and much of it she plays with real poignance. But a little too much theatrical "drunk" shtick creeps into the characterization for it to avoid the occasional lapse into overkill. 

The film's true star...and what an absolute marvel she is...is 10-year-old Patty McCormack. Although her performance is over-rehearsed to within a hairsbreadth, her Rhoda is an alternatingly chilling and hilarious characterization that has deservedly become iconic. An audaciously dark depiction of youthful duplicity—imagine Leave it to Beaver's Judy Hensler as a serial killer—Rhoda absolutely refuses to listen to anyone's drummer but her own. The way she exploits and subverts the expectations of traditional gender roles to her personal advantage feels like an act of guerrilla rebellion against the impossible image of female perfection and passivity she only superficially embodies. Rhoda Penmark is one of cinema's classic villains.

Leroy, Sex Bomb
In much of The Bad Seed's intentionally misleading publicity campaign, Leroy, the maintenance man, was presented in the context of some kind of sexual indignity suffered by the heroine 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

No longer a viable suspense thriller (not for me, anyway), The Bad Seed does work remarkably well as a satirical black comedy of American paranoia in the mid-'50s. McCarthyism took root when post-war America was just starting to look within its own backyard for threats to the so-called "American Way of Life." What did it find? Well, juvenile delinquency, for one. And what else is Rhoda but a steely-eyed juvenile delinquent in Mary Jane shoes? (OK, a juvenile homicidal delinquent, but I'm trying to make a point.) As the perfect little angel who'll stop at nothing to get that coveted Penmanship Medal, Rhoda is camouflaged anarchy let loose on idealized "normalcy." 

Like many a con man, crooked politician, or gangster throughout history, Rhoda manages to get away with murder (heh-heh) by presenting a false but reassuring front of conformity. Everyone is so slow to pick up on the rather obvious clues of Rhoda's guilt because….well, little girls just don't do that sort of thing. The reliability of appearances and the rigid adherence to societal roles were very real in the '50s, making it easier to accept that everyone buys into Rhoda's too-good-to-be-true act. 

The screenplay of the wholly forgettable 1985 TV remake of The Bad Seed failed to consider how much society's perception of childhood had changed post-Rosemary's Baby, The Omen, and The Exorcist, making the updated version come across as more antiquated than the original. 

A better remake, in spirit, if not in actuality, is The Good Son, a 1993 against-type departure for the unaccountably popular Macaulay Culkin.

You Gon' Die

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Despite its daringly original premise and first-class credentials, I'm afraid the movie that once promoted itself as "The most shocking motion picture ever made!" containing "The most chilling moment the screen has ever unleashed!" is, for me, now mostly an enduring camp staple. And though I'm aware that The Bad Seed continues to freak out entirely new generations of first-time viewers fortunate enough to catch it while they're still of an impressionable age (before their cynic genes kick in), my joy comes from familiarity. Make that overfamiliarity.

I still watch The Bad Seed often, each viewing being a somewhat home-grown MST3K experience where my partner and I talk to the screen, recite lines of dialogue, and affectionately laugh at the self-seriousness of it all. 

In her adult years, actress Patty McCormack has embraced The Bad Seed's cult/camp status. She frequently appears at screenings, judges Rhoda look-alike contests, and answers questions about making the film (her DVD commentary offers a wealth of behind-the-scenes info). Mining the camp factor, the play version of The Bad Seed has become a favorite of 99-seat theater productions, often with an adult male cast as Rhoda. People seem to have a deep affection for The Bad Seed, either due to childhood exposure to the then-frightening film, or a later-in-life cult appreciation for the way the laughs come at the expense of the film's sincere over-earnestness and '50s mindset, not the performances.

In the Censorship Code-sanctioned denouement, Rhoda returns to the pier to retrieve the coveted Penmanship Medal and gets more than she bargained for. In the play, Rhoda survives while her mother commits suicide.

Some time ago, I saw a stage production of The Bad Seed and was surprised to discover that one of the big shocker set pieces of the play was a nocturnal walk through the house by a restless Christine after the death of Leroy. It's a stormy night full of thunder and lightning, and as Christine moves to close an open window, a flash of lightning reveals the charred corpse of Leroy lunging out at her. It must have been a big "gotcha" moment back in its day. But on the night I attended, the actress playing Christine had so much trouble lifting the window blind, she was ultimately obliged to politely hold the stubborn curtain aside to facilitate her own persecution. Matters weren't helped by Leroy missing his key light, leaving him thoroughly in the shadows, resulting in Christine appearing to be engaged in hand-to-hand combat with her living room curtains. 

The Bad Seed opened on Broadway on December 8th, 1954

BONUS MATERIAL

Popping up now and again on YouTube and definitely worth the watch is the fabulous 1963 Turkish remake of The Bad Seed titled Kötü Tohum. Starring real-life mother and daughter Lale Oraloğlu and Alev Oraloğlu, it's a very well-made adaptation that hews closely to Maxwell Anderson's play but deviates from it in the most compelling ways. 

Read my essay on Kötü Tohum HERE

 

More shocking than anything you'll see in the film itself is this bit of mind-blowing behind-the-scenes cheesecake showing prim Nancy Kelly keeping the crew "entertained" between setups (more likely, giving her gams some air on the hot set). Meanwhile, Joan Croydon (Miss Fern) fails to get into the spirit of things.

Possibly the most egregiously off-the-wall of the many misleading ads concocted to market what was apparently very a difficult-to-market movie. Seriously, what were they thinking when they dreamed this one up?

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2012

THE AMITYVILLE HORROR 1979

Generally, I can think back to my adolescence and recall with relative clarity what it is I felt about most of the movies I saw at the time. What's perplexing is how often I fail to be blessed with the same level of recall when it comes to movies I've seen during my adult years. I was 21 when The Amityville Horror came out (not exactly yesterday, we're talking 39 years ago, folks); but thinking back on it, I can’t seem to remember exactly what I thought of then. I mean, did I find it even remotely scary? Did I buy into any of that “Based on a True Story” hype? Did I find it then, as I do now, to be an entertaining parade of haunted house clichés and hoary horror film tropes?

Worse, is there something metaphysically suspicious about my inability to remember? Hmmm….

James Brolin as George Lutz

Margot Kidder as Kathleen Lutz

Rod Steiger as Father Delaney

Don Stroud as Father Bolen

I have only the haziest memory of The Amityville Horror as the bestselling 1977 novel heavily promoted as being a fictionalization of the purported-to-be real-life story of a family beset by a series of paranormal events in their Long Island home which was at one time the site of a bloody mass murder. I had no interest in the book, nor do I even recall having paid much attention to news stories about the real-life DeFeo Murders which gave that distinctive-looking house its horror reputation. (On November 13, 1974, 23-year-old Ronald DeFeo, Jr. killed his parents and four three siblings in the home they shared in Amityville, Long Island).

What I do remember is that the film version of The Amityville Horror opened in the summer of 1979: two months after Ridley Scott’s mind-blowing Alien; one month after the hotly anticipated (by me), but wholly disappointing John Frankenheimer monster movie Prophecy; and two weeks after the bloodless Dracula re-up with Frank Langella.

My rapturous fondness for Alien—a film that reminded me of how much fun it is to be scared at the movies—had put me into a horror film frame of mind that summer. Unfortunately, the diminishing scare returns proffered by the above-listed roster films left me looking forward to the opening of The Amityville Horror with an enthusiasm drastically disproportionate to my actual interest in the movie. 

The Amityville house lays out the unwelcome mat for Kathy's Aunt Helena (Irene Dailey)

Propelled by a hope for a replay of the kind of jump-out-of-my-seat thrills Alien served up so plentifully, plus a desire to see what actress Margot Kidder had chosen for her follow-up vehicle to her star-making turn as Lois Lane in the blockbuster Christmas 1978 release Superman: The Movie (still playing in second-run theaters at the time); I stood in a long line on Hollywood Blvd on Friday, July 27^th, to catch The Amityville Horror on opening night. The house was packed and the theater was abuzz with the kind of amped-up excitement only an R-rating, “Based on a True Story”-hype, and saturation marketing can produce (“For God’s Sake, Get Out!” screamed posters from billboards and bus shelters all over town).

Unspooling under a cloak of collective audience goodwill that began to dissipate around the film’s 60-minute mark—when animated squeals of delight and nervous giggles began to take on the hollow timbre of blatantly derisive laughter—The Amityville Horror made it clear that as a horror movie, it was devoted to treading familiar haunted house/demonic possession ground. In due time it became clear that the film was going to lean heavily on its claims of “This really happened!” as a means of mitigating the fact that the episodic screenplay was less a cohesive story and more of a laundry list of “Things that make you go hmmm…” events taking place in a creepy old house.

This House Pays For Itself
Kathy's brother (Marc Vahanian) preps for his wedding as the house preps for a little self-help

Although The Amityville Horror was a more polished and technically tricked-out film than I’d come to expect from the traditionally low-rent American International Pictures, for all its sound and fury (a disproportionate amount both coming from the grievously miscalculated performances of Rod Steiger and Helen Shaver) I grew aware of the fact that The Amityville Horror was in no danger of posing any threat to the legacies of The Exorcist or The Omen. The audience I was with seemed to enjoy the film’s low-wattage fright delivery system (regular as clockwork...3:15am to be exact) and didn't seem to mind that the film was serving up equal doses of laughs and frights. I was disappointed, but I was also entertained. I just wish I could remember if any aspects of the film actually scared me. What I do recall is that I returned to see The Amityville Horror the following week with a friend, and his conclusion was that the film was more of a “fun” scary movie (escapist and diverting) than a legitimately frightening one.

In chronicling the strange occurrences that befall cash-strapped newlyweds George and Kathy Lutz (Brolin & Kidder) and their three kids (Kathy’s from a previous marriage) when they move into the spacious, obscenely affordable house--that just so happens to have been the site of a brutal mass killing the year before, The Amityville Horror goes for the semi-documentary approach. Events are charted with title cards highlighting dates and times, a device serving both to chronicle the escalating "hauntings" and to further suggest what you're watching has been documented as fact. By doing so, The Amityville Horror is able to dispense with a lot of time otherwise devoted to establishing character and plot, and can simply dive headlong into the horrors its title promises.

Wasting no time, the film opens with graphic depictions of the shotgun murders of the DeFeo family (although they're never named in the film) following this up whenever possible with closeups of characters “feeling uneasy” in the presence of odd camera angles and an intrusive musical score. The house, distinctive, camera-ready, and treated to a great many jack-o-lantern closeups, is filmed from so many flattering angles, it becomes the Barbra Streisand of haunted houses: always at the dead-center of the action.

Since the Lutz family only lived in the house for a month it’s imperative that weird things start to happen to them right off the bat. Events unfold at such breakneck speed that only after the film has ended does it dawn that those nondescript Lutz kids never attend school and that George’s surveyor business suffers financial setbacks curiously disproportionate to how brief is his period of neglect. 

While George obsessively continues to chop logs for the fire,
Kathy laments the sudden wood shortage in their bedroom
...if you get my cruder meaning.

Because a haunted house/possession story is nothing without religious subtext, our Kathy is Catholic. Or, more precisely, Hollywood Catholic. Which means she doesn’t actually go to church or display any discernible traits of spiritual devoutness, but she does paint Virgin Mary figurines, hang ginormous crucifixes all over the house, has an actual nun in her immediate family, and is given to grocery shopping in a fetish-y Catholic School Girl uniform.

Kathy’s Catholic background occasions her inviting priest and friend Father Delaney (Steiger) to come and bless the house. A bad idea for the puffy priest, but a bonanza for lovers of uncured ham and unbridled scenery-chewing. The somber seriousness accorded Rod Steiger’s appearance is ostensibly meant to signal the graveness of the Lutz’s situation and escalate the film’s drama, but the actor's emoting is so over-the-top it merely opens a hell-gate of hilarity.

Fathers Delaney and Bowen, badly in need of a St. Christopher medal

The horror gauntlet is thrown down via a series of mysterious-to-life-threatening events which place the Lutzes in a race against time, the forces of evil, and their own thick-headedness. And if the objectives of these forces are conveyed in the vaguest terms possible (Revenge? Demonic possession? The endless reenactment of a violent past?), rest assured that the scope and severity of these paranormal assaults (Gates of hell? Native-American burial ground? Devil-worship? Bad juju?) are mind-bogglingly elastic, inconsistent, and convenient to plot contrivance.

In the end, the scariest thing about The Amityville Horror is that this family of five occupying a three-story colonial doesn’t seem to own a television set. The rest is a comfortably conventional, enjoyably cheesy, surprisingly by-the-numbers haunted house tale with its fair share of jump-cut shocks (hissing cats, loud noises, the old “I wake up screaming” trope, flashes of gore); a few genuine creep-outs (the shotgun murders, the locked closet door, that weird little girl who looks like Robert Blake in a wig); and more than a few unintentional laughs (Brolin’s eye-popping mood swings, the cut-rate haunting special effects, the cartoonish reactions of visitors to the house).

While Kathy & George stare aghast at the front door that's been mysteriously blown off its hinges,
viewers get to stare at James Brolin's cobblers

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I have a hunch that both my infatuation with Margot Kidder and my initial ignorance of the story behind The Amityville Horror made that 1979 opening night screening an enjoyable one. But I’m just as certain that subsequent viewings of the film have been rooted in how enjoyably routine a movie it is. That’s certainly the case today. When I look at the film now, it plays like an end-of-the-decade “best of” medley of all the supernatural horror films of the 1970s. 

You could make a drinking game of the clichés.

The malevolent demon, ineffectual cop, the invisible friend: The Exorcist

The too-inexpensive-to-be-true, parasitic house: Burnt Offerings

Religious mumbo-jumbo: The Omen

House built over the gates of hell: The Sentinel

Serial killer possession: The Possession of Joel Delaney

Going back for the pet: Alien

And for good measure, you have a movie with an axe-wielding dad that predates The Shining by one year, plus a hyperactive house built above a burial ground that predates Poltergeist by two.

Creepy Amy (Natasha Ryan) consults with Jody, her invisible friend

The overall effect is of The Amityville Horror being something of a goulash horror creation. Everything but the kitchen sink (or bile-spilling toilet) seems to have been thrown into this mechanical mix of sure-fire horror standbys. Nothing wrong with that, but the film is so overcrowded with disparate ideas that it ends up with a ton of loose threads and setups introduced that fail to pay off. Happily, the whole undertaking manages to be repetitious without ever really being boring, so the film ends up as being inoffensively watchable as one of those Creature Features horror programmers aired on TV when I was a kid.

PERFORMANCES

No matter the relative quality of the end results, no one associated with The Amityville Horror can be accused of phoning in their performance. A fact that proves to be both a blessing and a curse.

Screenwriter Sandor Stern and director Stuart Rosenberg both come from television, which may account for every dramatic scene seeming to be structured to end in a fade-out and commercial break. As though to compensate for the halting, stop-start pace, the entire cast performs at near-operatic pitch. 

Mr. Groovy Guy
Full beards and big, pouffy hair were all the rage in the '70s.
Here's Brolin with his gay porn doppelganger George Payne  

Although easy on the eyes, I can’t say James Brolin (he’ll always be Mr. Barbra Streisand to me) had ever made much of an impression on me during his days as "the young guy" on TVs Marcus Welby, M.D. Here, however, as the possessed George Lutz, Brolin has so many scenes where he gets to bellow, shout, and bug his eyes out, he quickly became my favorite character in the film. He's so consistently bitchy and surly, it's like watching a hirsute Joan Crawford.

Margot Kidder, something of an early scream queen what with her roles in Sisters, Black Christmas, and The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, is the film’s bright spot. Unfortunately she's saddled with a role that has her doing what bad writers always have women do in horror movies: screaming and going around asking everybody if they’re OK. I love watching her though, and she remains a natural and charismatic presence even in the film’s most absurd moments. 

Rod Steiger, praying for an Oscar nomination

In what I can only hope was a Karen Black-like bid on Rod Steiger's part to invest The Amityville Horror with a little emotional gravitas (Black approached her role in the nonsensical Airport ’75 with intense solemnity because she felt no one else in the film was taking it seriously), Steiger—never a particularly subtle actor—in trying to convey spiritual anguish and fear, only succeeds in going full-tilt Neely O’Hara/Mommie Dearest on us.

As the concerned priest who becomes the target of the malevolent forces inhabiting the house, Steiger invests every moment onscreen with such ferocious overacting, I seriously thought in one scene his head was going to explode like that fellow in Scanners. Perhaps Steiger should be given credit for taking risks and being committed to the role, but it simply feels far too strenuous and undisciplined. His priest is off the rails before we get a chance to know anything about him.

Helen Shaver and Michael Sacks (Slaughterhouse Five) as family friends Carolyn and Jeff.
Playing a New-Age type, I'm not sure whose idea it was to have Shaver pitch her performance so high on the weird-o-meter, but her big scene in the Lutz's basement is listed in the dictionary under "overkill" 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

The Amityville Horror is guilty of not being very scary, which is a bit of a crime given that “horror” is part of the title. But, as someone once said about life (and goes double for motion pictures): “The one unforgivable sin is to be boring.” I could call this movie a lot of things, but boring isn't one of them; for what The Amityville Horror skimps on in thrills, logic, and coherence, it more than makes up for in unintentional laughs.

In 1979 when The Amityville Horror had its best chance of being taken seriously, public appetites were still so hungry for the next The Exorcist that the film became one of the highest grossers of the year. But that didn’t stop the opening night audience I saw it with from still appreciating the occasional laugh at the film’s expense.

Nauseous, sweating profusely, covered in flies, and witness to a door opening all by itself, 
Father Delaney has second thoughts about priests making house calls 

Margot Kidder and Lalo Schifrin's Oscar-nominated score work like Trojans trying to convince us that Kathy Lutz has seen something unspeakably terrifying outside of her daughter's second-story bedroom window. Regrettably, a cut to Kathy's POV reveals "glowing red eyes" that look for all the world like outdoor Christmas lights

Amity meets Amityville
Actor Murray Hamilton, who played the Doubting Thomas mayor of Amity in Jaws, this time out plays a Doubting Thomas priest. His brief scene in the film is memorable for the manner in which he commands a (still) frothing at the mouth Rod Steiger to sit down. It's like he's training an overgrown Bullmastiff 

Over the years, The Amityville Horror has spawned something like 15 Amityville-related sequels, remakes, and spinoffs. I don't know if this qualifies the original as some kind of minor classic or a mere franchise fluke; but for whatever reasons, The Amityville Horror (even with its always dubious claims to reality since debunked) has proved to be a movie that endures.  

Copyright © Ken Anderson

THE TENANT 1976

Spoiler Alert: Crucial plot points are revealed in the interest of critical analysis and discussion

Somewhere beyond the boundaries of the healthy, adaptive kind of Cultural Paranoia that I, a Black gay man, accesses daily to navigate hostile environments of discrimination and racial bias; on the far side of whatever amorphous fears are harbored by the kind of people who routinely dress in fatigues and buy anything with the word “Tactical” on the packaging; past the limits of the alternately narcissistic/masochistic borders of “Everyone’s out to get me!” delusional paranoia…there lies the macabre Twilight Zone that is Roman Polanski’s brilliant The Tenant. A bizarre, Kafkaesque exploration of social alienation and encroaching madness that film critic Vincent Canby accurately described as a nightmare vision of “Emotional isolation that becomes physical.”

Adapted for the screen with almost religious faithfulness by Polanski and longtime collaborator Gerard Brach from the 1964 novel Le Locataire Chimérique by Roland Topor, The Tenant marks the Academy Award-winning director’s 9th feature film. It also marks what many consider to be the third and final entry in his unofficial Urban Paranoia Trilogy (aka, his Apartment Trilogy): Repulsion – 1965, Rosemary’s Baby – 1965, & The Tenant – 1976. 

For his part, Polanski flatly denies ever deliberately setting out to make a contemporary terror triptych. But admirers of his work have seized upon the thematic recurrence in these films of many of the director’s most fervent obsessions: paranoia, alienation, sex, psychosis, subjective reality, and cramped dwellings. Each film in the trilogy is a modern-gothic study of urban dread set in a different, obliquely-threatening, impersonal city (London, Manhattan, and Paris, respectively). Their eerie narratives unfold largely within the oppressive confines of decaying apartment structures, wherein rooms take on the character of four-walled prisons-of-the-mind, mirroring the progressive mental deterioration of their psychologically isolated protagonists.

The lead character in The Tenant is male (Polanski himself, his 3rd on-screen appearance in one of his own films), signifying the trilogy’s sole departure from having a woman as the central focus of a storyline. 

It's neither coy nor misleading when I say that The Tenant does not disrupt the gender prominence of the trilogy. 

Roman Polanski as Trelkovsky

Isabelle Adjani as Stella

Shelley Winters as The Concierge

Melvyn Douglas as Monsieur Zy

Jo Van Fleet as Madame Dioz

Lila Kedrova as Madame Gaderian

There's a scene in the movie musical On a Clear Day You Can See Forever where Barbra Streisand—as wallflower go-a-longer Daisy Gamble—discloses to hypnotherapist Yves Montand the results of a vocational guidance test: "Healthy, adjusted, and no character. I mean, no character of any kind. I mean, not even any…characteristics!”

Well, that describes The Tenant's Monsieur Trelkovsky in a nutshell. Trelkovsky, a soft-spoken Polish-born office clerk of indeterminate disposition who continually has to remind people he’s a French citizen, is a fellow who tiptoes through life as though he holds only a month-to-month tenancy on his own body.

During what can only be assumed to be a severe mid-‘70s Parisian housing shortage, Trelkovsky is so desperate for lodgings that he pursues—with a self-interest bordering on the ghoulish—the not-yet-vacated apartment of a not-yet-dead attempted suicide. The tenant, a young Egyptologist named Simone Choule, threw herself from the window of her flat just days before and now lies in a coma at a nearby hospital.

Faced with a moral conundrum (his wish to acquire the apartment is the silent, simultaneous wish that she won’t recover), Trelkovsky, in a gesture bearing the outward appearance of sympathy, but could just as likely be a cagey "calculation of probability" field trip—visits Mlle Choule in the hospital. Wrapped head to toe in bandages, the Egyptologist indeed looks like a mummy herself, with nothing of the woman beneath visible save for a single staring eye and a gaping mouth from which a tooth is conspicuously, grotesquely missing.

Presented as though it were a bonus feature of the apartment, the concierge shows
Trelkovsky the hole Simone Choule's body made in the glass awning four stories below

Simone Choule dies shortly after this visit (brought to a jarring conclusion when the patient lets out a soul-rattling scream at the sight of the stranger at her bedside). And Trelkovsky—pragmatically heedless of any possible bad omens augured by gaining advantageous self-benefit at the price of another's misfortune—wastes no time moving into the apartment. An apartment that hasn’t yet been entirely cleared of the dead woman’s possessions.

Early scenes show Trelkovsky getting what he wants by adopting a persona of over-polite inoffensiveness (e.g., he finesses the bulldoggish concierge by paying her a gratuity and placates the surly landlord by appealing to his financial practicality). These passively assertive acts suggest that perhaps Trelkovsky’s outwardly suppressed identity is more of an adaptive skill; a tool a Polish émigré hones in a city where being “foreign” instantly brands one a target of suspicion and distrust.

Presuming that a certain characterlessness and malleability of personality are what Trelkovsky has always relied upon as a survival mechanism to go about life as unobtrusively as possible; The Tenant effectively puts the turn to the screw by making this quality in Trelkovsky...a “vacancy of self”...the tragic flaw that will come to seal his fate. 

Though interested in Simone's friend, Stella, Trelkovsky, by lying about knowing Simone and keeping his occupancy of her apartment a secret, must keep part of his true identity hidden.  

The apartment building Trelkovsky now calls home can be summed up by a term coined in Woody Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery; a neurotic’s jackpot. Almost immediately after moving in, Trelkovsky begins to suspect every tenant of being a furtive, inhospitable oddball who, when not lodging noise complaints about his every move; monitoring his comings and goings; or staring into his apartment from windows across the courtyard, is working in concert in a plot to get him to somehow become Simon Choule and give an encore performance of her dramatically gravitational exit.

But after an incident at Simone's funeral (where his sexual guilt turns a eulogy into a fire and brimstone lambaste), it's apparent Trelkovsky isn't what you'd call a reliable narrator. 

Thus, The Tenant builds suspense by sustaining a disconcertingly ambiguous tone throughout. One is never quite sure whether Trelkovsky's horrors are psychological (a mental breakdown), sociological (xenophobia), or supernatural (anyone for a mummy’s curse?)

Trelkovsky: Tomb Raider

Clockwise from top left: 1. The mummified Simone Choule. 2. Trelkovsky receives a postcard of an Egyptian sarcophagus. 3. In a hallucinative state, Trelkovsky sees Egyptian hieroglyphs on the building’s communal bathroom wall. 4. Trelkovsky is given one of Simone's books, The Romance of a Mummy by Théophile Gautier (1858). 

Simone being an Egyptologist, rather than merely being a bit of backstory info about the former renter, becomes a prominent theme underscoring the somewhat paranormal shift The Tenant takes in its second act. The fact that so many of Simone Choule’s left-behind items (books, drawings, sculpture) reflect her interest and immersion in the culture of ancient Egypt makes Trelkovsky’s swift occupancy of her apartment feel as though he’s somehow disturbing the resting space of the deceased. Similarly, the Egyptian belief in immortality, with its attendant burial rituals devoted to preserving the body and the soul's rebirth, finds its queasy contemporary correlative in Simone Choule’s medical mummification. Swathed in bandages, Simone and her staring eye and missing tooth horrifically reference the Egyptian “opening of the mouth” ceremony; a rite performed to return the human senses to the soul in the afterlife.

Self-Alienation / Fragmented Identity

Trelkovsky’s “possession” by Simone is entirely superficial (he gains absolutely no insight into the woman’s self) signaling his metamorphosis is more a self-generated delusion than an act of actually "becoming" Choule. Amounting to little more than the appropriation of only the most external signifiers of Simone's identity—clothes, makeup, cigarettes, hot chocolate, books—Trelkovsky turning into Simone feels less like The Tenant seeking to explore the flexible quadrants of gender and more like surrealists Topor and Polanski merely attaching existential theory to the question "Do clothes make the (wo)man?"

Trelkovsky's one success at making human contact.
Unable to prevent his own suicide, Trelkovsky intervenes in the possible suicide of Simone's unrequited suitor George Bedar (played by Jacques Narcy). Bedar's romantic misdirection (he was apparently unaware of Simone's disinterest in men) mirrors Trelkovsky's inert sexuality

In Rosemary’s Baby, Polanski toyed with the notion of ancient evil (pagan witchcraft and Satan worship) surviving into the 20th century. A similar vein is mined in The Tenant’s paralleling of Egyptian mythology (immortality and the dominance of the soul in determining self) with the dissociative aspects of modern urban life (the separate-yet-together existence of apartment-dwelling) that prioritize the individual. I.e., a civilization that values holed-up privacy, solitude, keeping to oneself, and minding one’s own business can foster relativism and the solipsistic view that the mind alone is sovereign of the self.

But if the mind is the sole determiner of self, is each person then ruled by their own individual perception of reality?

Heads, attached and disembodied, figure as a motif in The Tenant. Ceramic busts appear in the apartments of Trelkovsky (Egyptian, of course) and Mr. Zy. Trelkovsky has a hallucination that his neighbors are playing football with a human head (Simone's or his own) in the courtyard

A drunk Trelkovsky ponders the philosophical, metaphysical,
and mythical concepts of "self"

The Tenant premiered at The Regency Theater in San Francisco in the summer of 1976, and I was beyond excited to see it. Expectations were high, as it had been two years since the release of Chinatown. The Tenant’s chilling teaser trailer (with the soon-to-be-unfortunate tagline “No one does it to you like Roman Polanski”) promised a welcome return to type from the director who scared the hell out of me when I was eleven with what was then...and still remains...my #1 favorite motion picture of all time: Rosemary’s Baby.

The Wide-Angle Distorted Perception Peephole Shot
Repulsion - Rosemary's Baby - The Tenant

 WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM 

It's not overstatement when I say The Tenant had me from the jump (pun possibly intended). After the sun-baked Southern California vistas of Chinatown, I was delighted with Polanski’s return to creepily claustrophobic interiors, menacing old people, and his lived-in, off-kilter brand of psychological horror. A movie that hits the ground running—with a dizzying, voyeuristic panning shot of apartment windows, revealing shifting glimpses of both Trelkovsky and Simone Choule staring through curtains at “the real(?)” Trelkovsky entering the courtyard to inquire about the availability of the apartment he already appears to be occupying—The Tenant is a film that wears its weirdness on its sleeve. 

That's the film's composer Philippe Sarde as the theater patron who prefers
watching Trelkovsky and Stella to watching the movie screen. It's a running paradox
in The Tenant that Trelkovsky's privacy decreases as his alienation increases.

Given invaluable, atmospheric assist by Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist and French composer Philippe Sarde, Polanski, in adapting Roland Topor’s novel, proves, as he did with Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, he's adept at making someone else's nightmares seem as though they originated out of his own well-stocked store of personal demons and obsessions. Sharing Topor’s outsider's eye for finding the ominous in the ordinary (both are Paris-born sons of Polish-Jewish immigrant parents), the close-quarters dictates of The Tenant's setting allow Polanski to indulge his trademark canniness in turning living environments into starkly-rendered extensions of a character’s inner dread.  

Roland Topor, the surrealist artist, novelist, and playwright behind The Tenant, played
 Renfield opposite Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog's Nosferatu (1979). Topor's scatological preoccupations, dark humor, and absurdist worldview find their aesthetic twin in Polanski.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Psychological thrillers about personality theft, duality, and the fluidity of identity have fascinated me…forever. Especially when they spill over into possible supernatural/horror territory. Growing up the only boy of five children, parents divorced/mom remarries, Catholic school, gay, shy, and the only Black family in an all-white neighborhood gave me a leg-up in the “Who the fuck am I?” adolescent identity sweepstakes. So, films were my retreat, and movies that (melo)dramatized the puzzle of self: Vertigo (1958), The Servant (1963), Secret Ceremony (1968), Performance (1970), Images (1972), Obsession (1976), 3 Women (1977), Fedora (1978), Dead Ringers (1988), Single White Female (1992), and Black Swan (2010)—were my catharsis.

My recently having had the opportunity to read the novel prompted my partner and me to watch The Tenant last Halloween. My first time seeing the film in several years. This time out, I was struck by how many of the persecutory torments pushing Trelkovsky to the brink of madness (being persistently watched, always having his behavior monitored, instantly being branded a target of suspicion, prejudicially profiled, having his experience invalidated) is kinda like an average day for a Black person living in America. 

The terrorism of racism and "Living While Black" has always resulted in feelings of alienation, isolation, and anxiety among Black people, and movies like The Tenant have been a means of accessing those fears in a broad, generalized context. However, it wasn't until the release of 1995's Tales from the Hood by Rusty Cundieff, and Jordan Peele's Get Out (2017) that I ever saw a director illuminate the anxieties particular to racism and unique to the Black Experience in this country in the form and context of the horror genre.

The American cast members of The Tenant

PERFORMANCES

Polanski started out as an actor (and never stopped, if all those behind-the-scenes photos of him “directing by demonstrating” tell the tale), so I wasn’t really surprised by how effective he is in the role of Trelkovsky. Casting himself very much to type, Polanski essentially IS the Trelkovsky of Topor’s novel...there being the shadow of something unsavory about him even at his most vulnerable. And he's particularly persuasive in conveying the anxiety and jumpy self-absorption that accompanies his character’s intensifying psychotic delusions. 

I've no idea what motivated Polanski to cast so many American actors in major roles in this Paris-set thriller (likely financial in origin, to secure American distribution or wide release). But the overall effect is so discordant it actually feels intentional. The clashing of Trelkovsky’s faint Polish accent against all those flat Yankee diphthongs dramatically emphasizes his "otherness.". At the same time, the incongruousness of the glaringly non-Gallic Shelly Winters, Jo Van Fleet, and Melvyn Douglas only seem to add another layer of wacko to The Tenant’s existing Theater of the Absurd vision of Paris. 

French cinema icon Claude Daupin makes a brief appearance (with Louba Guertchikoff)
 but his mellifluous accent is dubbed over with an affectless American voice 

Unfortunately, a similar decision to have many members of the film's French supporting cast dubbed (poorly) by American actors doesn't fare nearly as well. Certainly, a case could be made that those braying American voices coming out of the mouths of Trelkovsky's boorish friends is a reflection of how he sees them, but I only found it distracting. Polanski's eye for casting people with unusual and characterful faces is as sharp as ever, but hearing those commonplace voices coming out of those unorthodox faces was like having ice water thrown in my face. It jolts me out of the atmospheric dream world I'd rather be immersed in. 

Although sorely underutilized, I adore Isabelle Adjani in The Tenant. I only recently learned that Adjani's voice was dubbed by Dark Shadows actress Kathryn Leigh Scott. Seen here with Sam Waterston in 1974's The Great Gatsby

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Polanski films are always rich in visual motifs, and The Tenant is no exception. The aforementioned Egyptian details, mummification references, and emphasis on all things cranial. Present, too, are his amplified ticking clocks and distorted perception shots of hallways and rooms (in particular, a fabulous fever dream sequence where Trelkovsky is dwarfed by the furniture in his room).

La Peinture Lure (Hello, Google Translate)
It seems Polanski hired Roland Topor to paint this mystifying poster
that appears frequently and enigmatically throughout the film

But in a film about paranoia, it's simply genius to have so many characters sporting those ginormous spectacles that were so popular in the '70s. They're like portable windows with magnified eyes staring out at Trelkovsky. 

The Tenant is one of my top five favorite Roman Polanski films. It's an intriguing puzzle that yields a different solution every time I watch it.

BONUS MATERIAL

The First-Time Tenant

I moved to Los Angeles in 1978, and my very first apartment was a small furnished single on the second floor of The Villa Elaine Apartments in Hollywood. I was 20 years old, my first time away from home, and I couldn’t believe I was living within walking distance of THE Hollywood and Vine. The rent was $160 a month, including utilities, and I was in absolute heaven. Built in 1925, The Villa Elaine has since been declared a historical landmark. My old apartment now goes for $1650.

My Apartment Is In Here Somewhere
I lived in the Villa Elaine until 1981, moving to a courtyard-view apartment in 1979 that afforded a Rear Window panorama of my neighbors. Note the poster for The Tenant at bottom left

The day I moved into The Villa Elaine was Sunday, June 4, 1978. A date whose significance was compounded by what happened after I’d settled in and kissed my parents (who’d driven me and my blue storage trunk down from Berkeley for a weekend of whirlwind apartment-hunting) goodbye.

To exercise my freedom, I went out to look at my "new neighborhood." My walk took me to Hollywood Blvd., where the movie Grease was having its World Premiere at Mann's Chinese Theater. In those days, onlookers could stand and star-gaze in relative close proximity behind a velvet rope, so I was overjoyed at experiencing a real-life The Day of the Locust moment (minus the apocalyptic carnage) and screamed along with the rest when Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta arrived in a vintage car.

As I walked back to my apartment, the 1977 Rufus & Chaka Khan song “Hollywood” playing on a loop in my head; I was thoroughly over the moon. I couldn’t believe my first night in LA had serendipitously yielded such a quintessential, only-in-Hollywood experience. All of which I, of course, took as an omen that I had found my new home. And I guess it was; June 4th of 2023 will mark my 45th Anniversary as an LA resident.

The Villa Elaine courtyard as it looks today

I’ve lived in many apartments over the years, and I'm happy to say I've never had an experience even remotely similar to what’s in The Tenant.

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009  -  2023