The Spell (1977)

Rita Matchett (Susan Myers) is bullied by her peers as well as by her much more mainstream-compatible sister Kris (a very young Helen Hunt) for being mildly overweight as well as because of her general vague “weirdness”. Her family is of little help: father Glenn (James Olson) neither likes her nor seems to give a crap about his less easily relatable daughter’s wellbeing, and her mother Marilyn (Lee Grant) is theoretically trying to help but is in practice at best not actively harmful, and really, for most of the film way nearly as egotistical as her husband, which is saying something.

Things begin to change with the accidental yet strange death of a classmate who was a particularly nasty bully. Rita – to the horror of particularly her dad – seems to start to take pride in being different (oh, the horror!). Soon, other people who give her trouble begin having accidents as well.

Lee Philips’s The Spell is an – appropriately – unholy mixture of formalistically shot family drama with arthouse ambitions, overheated 70s occult horror tropes, and oh so many scenes of absolutely terrible parenting the film seems to believe are at least somewhat okay. Also appearing are a bunch of very funny made up “parapsychological” concepts and terms, and a shock ending that has sod all to do with anything else the movie cares about.

As is painfully obvious, this is one of those movies that attempt to use horror movie tropes to express the fear of clearly freaking rich “middleclass” people of having nonconforming children. The better movies of this type – be they about witches or young female telekinesis practitioners – tend to show the story from the perspective of the maltreated child that eventually explodes, putting an emphasis on the destructive power of the society around them awakening a different kind of destructive power in them as a form of psychic self-defence.

This film at hand is told from Marilyn’s perspective, however, and really doesn’t seem to know what exactly it is trying to do with this, wavering between conservative hand-wringing, compassion with Rita and bouts of apparently believing that being a shit parent is a-okay because of some 70s “finding oneself” bullshit. The film makes little effort actually getting inside of Rita’s mind; which is particularly problematic since there’s very little of interest going on in her parents’ heads, even though Marilyn who is at least trying to do right by her more difficult offspring, is the somewhat more sympathetic of the two.

The film’s largest problem, however, is that Philips really doesn’t seem to know what he wants to do with the metaphorical elements of the narrative, nor how to make this part of the script work in tandem with the film as a horror film. Consequently, the metaphorical level seems to have little resolution and meaning while the horror plot stops and starts and goes nowhere fitting.

From time to time, the heated family discussions suddenly ring true in a more realistic manner, and two of the horror sequences are surprisingly effective. But that’s really all there is to The Spell.

I See You (2019)

Warning: I’m not going to spoil the very twist-heavy film completely, but I will at least discuss the horror sub-genre it will turn out to use the most, which is a rather major spoiler in this case!

The Harper family does suffer from rather a lot of inter-familiar tensions right now. Mother Jackie (Helen Hunt) has apparently cheated on her husband Greg (Jon Tenney), causing rifts to open not just between herself and him but also their teenage son Connor (Judah Lewis) who clearly also has a lot of other teenage issues independent from this to work through. Jackie’s clearly trying to make up for her error but the men don’t exactly seem willing to forgive; or really, not even willing to give up on rubbing salt in everyone’s wounds. Well, at least they have a house so big, you’d usually house four or more families their size in it, thanks to Jackie coming from money (which Greg of course doesn’t cope terribly well with because of some macho bullshit or other).

The tension isn’t going to decrease with Greg’s new case. Kids in the area are disappearing and later turning up dead. Some evidence suggests it’s a sequel to a series of kidnappings and murders of children a couple of years earlier. The problem is that Greg’s partner Spitzky (Gregory Alan Williams) was working the earlier case, and he is absolutely convinced the man they arrested then was indeed responsible for the murders.

While all this is going on, peculiar and disturbing things happen in the Harper home. At first, it’s only minor things, a cup not being where Jackie put it, and things like that, but the situation escalates rather quickly, the occurrences turning threatening in very intimate ways, suggesting an movement towards something much worse. Given the state of relations between the Harpers, it’s not surprising that everyone acts a little paranoid, not exactly thinking the other members of the family carry any responsibility for what’s going on, yet also not quite trusting each other not to have been responsible. Of course, things are much worse than that.

As the more frequent visitors among my imaginary readers know, I don’t generally enjoy movies that are heavily based on twists, mostly because these films tend to subsume what I find rather more interesting in a narrative – mood, theme and character – under the needs of plot affordances. So it can initially come as a bit of a surprise how much I think of Adam Randall’s I See You.

There are a couple of reasons for that, however. Firstly, while plot certainly is the most important element of the film, it just scarcely beats my old friend mood. For much of the first act here isn’t just used to bring all the pieces for the twist chess game onto the board but also create a mood of dread, mostly with techniques that reminded me, particularly in combination with the astonishingly creepy score by one William Arcane (which must be pseudonym, right?), quite a bit of Hereditary, not quite as a brilliantly realized, but highly effective nonetheless. And though the film’s structure doesn’t really lend itself to very deep characterisation, what is there is excellently played and written (script by Devon Graye), suggesting a lot of backstory instead of spelling it out. Unlike most twist movies, I See You also seems to understand the importance of fitting the twists and the characters to each other, so you never get the feeling the twists contradict what we have learned about these people but instead deepen and complicate it.

Returning to the importance of mood, the film changes its early tone of dread rather effectively with the mid-act reveal, at the same time changing genre and stepping from what felt like the start of highly disturbing supernatural horror into the usually less exalted area of the home invasion movie, and so promising a very rational explanation for what’s going on. We do indeed get that explanation, eventually, but not before the movie has assumed another form again, returning to the feeling of dread without the involvement of anything possibly supernatural.

The home invasion element seem to me particularly interesting on a thematic level. My problem with the home invasion film in general – certain examples of it are of course quite different – is the one of its class politics: these are usually films about rich people (and yeah, they’re going to call themselves middle class, but they are indeed rich to anyone who isn’t) being threatened by that most horrible of things, people from the lower classes who clearly haven no reason at all to be angry, no sir, the films all too often aiming for total identification with the rich people fighting off the monstrous poor. For someone coming from a line of people cleaning up other people’s messes, this sort of thing is pretty damn distasteful to me. So I found myself rather delighted that I See You doesn’t actually use the home invasion scenario this way. Instead, it turns out to be a film not about a threat coming from outside violating the innocent bourgeoisie, but the outside force invading the rich family’s privacy (secretly in this case) is actually there to witness and reveal all the horrors and dangers that have been lurking under the veneer of normalcy all along, the true danger coming from the inside and not the outside. And no, this isn’t so crudely done as to make everyone in the family cannibals or in fact even a horrible person; the film does prefer a bit more complexity. Which also turns I See You’s formal trickery and at least most of its twists into methods to enhance its thematic pull, using its narrative form as part of its argument.


Throughout, the film is also simply an engaging piece of horror cinema, breathing an air of the creepy and the wrong, going through its twists like they actually mean something. And sure, since the film is playing fair, I did see quite a few of the twists beyond the genre shift coming before the actual dramatic reveal; I just found the rest of I See You so engaging on other levels, this felt like a minor problem in a film that does so very much right.