.
.The last Hammer horror film made before the studio collapsed as a feature production entity (only the awful remake of The Lady Vanishes, not a horror film unless you count Cybill Shepherd with a Hitler moustache, followed it) is a troublesome beast. Adapted from a Dennis Wheatley novel, but injected with a disreputable dose of Aleister Crowley and post-The Exorcist religious angst, To The Devil… is for much of its running time one of the strongest Hammer films of the decade, certainly miles ahead of the tackiness of The Vampire Lovers (1970) or the high-concept, low-result Hands of the Ripper (1972). Director Peter Sykes utilises David Watkin’s crisp, naturalistic photography to conjure a decidedly modern, artful, confrontational approach to the Gothic. As opposed to the gently stylised period poise and serial-like pace of the previous Hammer Wheatley-witchcraft film, The Devil Rides Out (1967), To The Devil… takes place in a firmly contemporary setting.
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.Father Michael (Christopher Lee) is excommunicated at the film’s opening, but twenty years and a few grey hairs later, he’s still kicking about with nuns. He comes to fetch comely teenaged novice Catherine (Nastassja Kinski) from an island convent in Bavaria, and bring her to England. Meanwhile, divorced, aging, cynical Occult writer, John Verney (Richard Widmark), is beset at a book launch by Catherine’s desperate father, Henry Beddows (Denholm Elliot): he begs him to use his impressive, if purely theoretical and not at all credulous, knowledge of the lore to protect Catherine from Michael’s evil machinations.
.The last Hammer horror film made before the studio collapsed as a feature production entity (only the awful remake of The Lady Vanishes, not a horror film unless you count Cybill Shepherd with a Hitler moustache, followed it) is a troublesome beast. Adapted from a Dennis Wheatley novel, but injected with a disreputable dose of Aleister Crowley and post-The Exorcist religious angst, To The Devil… is for much of its running time one of the strongest Hammer films of the decade, certainly miles ahead of the tackiness of The Vampire Lovers (1970) or the high-concept, low-result Hands of the Ripper (1972). Director Peter Sykes utilises David Watkin’s crisp, naturalistic photography to conjure a decidedly modern, artful, confrontational approach to the Gothic. As opposed to the gently stylised period poise and serial-like pace of the previous Hammer Wheatley-witchcraft film, The Devil Rides Out (1967), To The Devil… takes place in a firmly contemporary setting..
.Father Michael (Christopher Lee) is excommunicated at the film’s opening, but twenty years and a few grey hairs later, he’s still kicking about with nuns. He comes to fetch comely teenaged novice Catherine (Nastassja Kinski) from an island convent in Bavaria, and bring her to England. Meanwhile, divorced, aging, cynical Occult writer, John Verney (Richard Widmark), is beset at a book launch by Catherine’s desperate father, Henry Beddows (Denholm Elliot): he begs him to use his impressive, if purely theoretical and not at all credulous, knowledge of the lore to protect Catherine from Michael’s evil machinations..
.Beddows himself needs protecting, as he barely survives an assassination attempt, blowing a hole in his assailant. Verney manages to spirit Catherine away from Michael’s watchful henchmen at the airport, and stashes her in his apartment, using his agent David (Anthony Valentine) and his wife Anna (Honor Blackman) as sitters whilst he tries to discover what Michael’s up to.
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.This proves to be a project to allow Astaroth, a demon that Michael believes to be God himself to all intents and purposes, to enter our world: he signed her mother Eveline (Eva Maria Meineke), who died giving birth to Catherine, into his covenant, and then enforced the deal on her weak father with a physical pledge that will cause him to burst into flames if he breaks the pact. Now, as the culmination of his efforts approach, he has impregnated, in an orgy, acolyte Margaret (Isabella Telezynska), with a physical incarnation of Astaroth. But that grotesque baby can’t live long, and Michael needs to use Catherine as his earthly avatar, planning to baptise her in Astaroth’s blood.
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.It’s a pity Lee’s playing the bad guy and not reincarnating his implacable Duc de Richelieu, because Widmark’s character is a comparatively poor substitute. Nonetheless, Sykes keeps the conflicting energies of old- and new-school horror in interesting balance, counterpointing a low-key evocation of a busy modern London and sunny pastoral settings, with intense sequences like that in which Astaroth is born, and bizarre moments like when Elliott is presented with his pledge to be faithful to the Satanists by the ghost of his dead wife, whose bloodied body lies on a nearby altar.
.Beddows himself needs protecting, as he barely survives an assassination attempt, blowing a hole in his assailant. Verney manages to spirit Catherine away from Michael’s watchful henchmen at the airport, and stashes her in his apartment, using his agent David (Anthony Valentine) and his wife Anna (Honor Blackman) as sitters whilst he tries to discover what Michael’s up to..
.This proves to be a project to allow Astaroth, a demon that Michael believes to be God himself to all intents and purposes, to enter our world: he signed her mother Eveline (Eva Maria Meineke), who died giving birth to Catherine, into his covenant, and then enforced the deal on her weak father with a physical pledge that will cause him to burst into flames if he breaks the pact. Now, as the culmination of his efforts approach, he has impregnated, in an orgy, acolyte Margaret (Isabella Telezynska), with a physical incarnation of Astaroth. But that grotesque baby can’t live long, and Michael needs to use Catherine as his earthly avatar, planning to baptise her in Astaroth’s blood..
.It’s a pity Lee’s playing the bad guy and not reincarnating his implacable Duc de Richelieu, because Widmark’s character is a comparatively poor substitute. Nonetheless, Sykes keeps the conflicting energies of old- and new-school horror in interesting balance, counterpointing a low-key evocation of a busy modern London and sunny pastoral settings, with intense sequences like that in which Astaroth is born, and bizarre moments like when Elliott is presented with his pledge to be faithful to the Satanists by the ghost of his dead wife, whose bloodied body lies on a nearby altar..
.Hammer’s inability to adapt properly to a new epoch of horror often resulted in an air of awkward pandering and clumsy luridness grafted onto the traditional template. To The Devil… doesn’t entirely escape that air of contingency raciness, throwing in a risible orgy sequence (Lesbians! Flagellation! Christopher Lee’s butt-double!) and full-frontal shots of Nastassja Kinski; but it is at least an appropriate aspect of a Sex Magick take on Wheatley’s wheezy mysticism. Sykes has an eye for fetishist grotesquery, as when Margaret is bound with lace ribbons to prevent her demon-baby taking the more traditional path out of her body, and when Kinski dreams of a bloody foetal Astaroth rubbing against her belly and trying to crawl inside her.
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.Sykes stokes the religious angle, taking as literal the notion of devil worship as inversion of the iconography of Christianity as keynote for making disturbing suggestions about the interaction of religion and sexuality: Michael believes that Astaroth is God, and not the Devil, and his efforts take on a cultish, messianic quality that would have made perfect sense in the era of Jim Jones and Michelle Remembers.
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.With its images of perverted sex and birth, somewhere in here is a biting take on efforts to control female sexuality, as Father Michael seeks to use nun Catherine in fulfilling his mission, to convince her to let herself be annihilated as a person for the sake of his God, a particularly warped take on the idea of becoming a Bride of the Lord. There’s the mockery of a birth rite, in which Michael and his fellow acolytes tend to Margaret in giving birth like tender ministers, only to ensure that Astaroth be born in the correct fashion – that is, to tear his way out Margaret’s belly. Michael, the heretic priest, takes the patriarchal desire to use female flesh as the conduit for his own purposes to obscene limits, and turns inside out the panicked attempts to strap down and beat into submission the body of Regan in The Exorcist (1973) as victory for righteousness.
.
.Such efforts to create an erotic-horror sub-genre to a certain degree concords with the metaphoric flesh-twisting of Cronenberg, and the repetitive, misogynistic penetration of the ‘80s slasher film, and yet also stands apart from these, for the film is intriguingly honest about the sexual anxieties at the heart of the genre.
.
.Sykes’ emphasis is on explicable and coherent narrative, and To The Devil… might look a bit nuts-and-bolts in comparison to Dario Argento’s Suspiria, released a year later, with its almost abstract plot and emphasis on high style, or John Carpenter’s giallo-influenced gamesmanship with Halloween, which produced the definitive blueprint for ‘80s horror, which might suggest that Hammer had been left behind. But it’s the cool, matter-of-fact quality of To The Devil… that is its distinction, much like Bava’s final film Shock, also from the following year. Sykes and Bava set their films in a demonstrably real world, free of all but the most corporeal-looking of special effects. All these films signalled the turn of an era. Argento’s films would become increasingly less intricate in their stylisation as he pushed towards bland gore-mongering. Carpenter gave birth to the awful wave of ‘80s slasher films that reproduced structure without understanding, and Sykes’ and Bava’s movies were almost the final gasp of intelligent Gothic.
.
.Sykes’ film sports, at least, a reasonably good script (by Christopher Wicking and John Peacock), with interesting characters and believable interactions, particularly the amusing banter of Valentine and Blackman’s doomed couple. Apart from the very green Kinski (in her second film), whose insipid line readings and tongue-lolling attempts to suggest demonic passion could have ended her career almost before it began, the acting is of a high calibre: Elliott steals the film effortlessly with a perfect character turn as a suitably sweaty, seedy father, but Widmark is good and Lee, perhaps because he was glad to be doing Wheatley again, plays Michael with an intensity he didn’t work up much in the ‘70s.
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The film only crashes right at the end, in which the finale comes an abrupt, almost senseless halt, almost as if the filmmakers ran out of shooting stock, but it’s probably more because of studio cold feet over whether to follow through with the threat that Verney’s efforts have been in vain. This ragged end betrays an otherwise interesting and gripping final fling for the great British House of Horror.
.
.Hammer’s inability to adapt properly to a new epoch of horror often resulted in an air of awkward pandering and clumsy luridness grafted onto the traditional template. To The Devil… doesn’t entirely escape that air of contingency raciness, throwing in a risible orgy sequence (Lesbians! Flagellation! Christopher Lee’s butt-double!) and full-frontal shots of Nastassja Kinski; but it is at least an appropriate aspect of a Sex Magick take on Wheatley’s wheezy mysticism. Sykes has an eye for fetishist grotesquery, as when Margaret is bound with lace ribbons to prevent her demon-baby taking the more traditional path out of her body, and when Kinski dreams of a bloody foetal Astaroth rubbing against her belly and trying to crawl inside her..
.Sykes stokes the religious angle, taking as literal the notion of devil worship as inversion of the iconography of Christianity as keynote for making disturbing suggestions about the interaction of religion and sexuality: Michael believes that Astaroth is God, and not the Devil, and his efforts take on a cultish, messianic quality that would have made perfect sense in the era of Jim Jones and Michelle Remembers..
.With its images of perverted sex and birth, somewhere in here is a biting take on efforts to control female sexuality, as Father Michael seeks to use nun Catherine in fulfilling his mission, to convince her to let herself be annihilated as a person for the sake of his God, a particularly warped take on the idea of becoming a Bride of the Lord. There’s the mockery of a birth rite, in which Michael and his fellow acolytes tend to Margaret in giving birth like tender ministers, only to ensure that Astaroth be born in the correct fashion – that is, to tear his way out Margaret’s belly. Michael, the heretic priest, takes the patriarchal desire to use female flesh as the conduit for his own purposes to obscene limits, and turns inside out the panicked attempts to strap down and beat into submission the body of Regan in The Exorcist (1973) as victory for righteousness..
.Such efforts to create an erotic-horror sub-genre to a certain degree concords with the metaphoric flesh-twisting of Cronenberg, and the repetitive, misogynistic penetration of the ‘80s slasher film, and yet also stands apart from these, for the film is intriguingly honest about the sexual anxieties at the heart of the genre..
.Sykes’ emphasis is on explicable and coherent narrative, and To The Devil… might look a bit nuts-and-bolts in comparison to Dario Argento’s Suspiria, released a year later, with its almost abstract plot and emphasis on high style, or John Carpenter’s giallo-influenced gamesmanship with Halloween, which produced the definitive blueprint for ‘80s horror, which might suggest that Hammer had been left behind. But it’s the cool, matter-of-fact quality of To The Devil… that is its distinction, much like Bava’s final film Shock, also from the following year. Sykes and Bava set their films in a demonstrably real world, free of all but the most corporeal-looking of special effects. All these films signalled the turn of an era. Argento’s films would become increasingly less intricate in their stylisation as he pushed towards bland gore-mongering. Carpenter gave birth to the awful wave of ‘80s slasher films that reproduced structure without understanding, and Sykes’ and Bava’s movies were almost the final gasp of intelligent Gothic..
.Sykes’ film sports, at least, a reasonably good script (by Christopher Wicking and John Peacock), with interesting characters and believable interactions, particularly the amusing banter of Valentine and Blackman’s doomed couple. Apart from the very green Kinski (in her second film), whose insipid line readings and tongue-lolling attempts to suggest demonic passion could have ended her career almost before it began, the acting is of a high calibre: Elliott steals the film effortlessly with a perfect character turn as a suitably sweaty, seedy father, but Widmark is good and Lee, perhaps because he was glad to be doing Wheatley again, plays Michael with an intensity he didn’t work up much in the ‘70s..
.The film only crashes right at the end, in which the finale comes an abrupt, almost senseless halt, almost as if the filmmakers ran out of shooting stock, but it’s probably more because of studio cold feet over whether to follow through with the threat that Verney’s efforts have been in vain. This ragged end betrays an otherwise interesting and gripping final fling for the great British House of Horror.
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