“The people of Bellenac are deeply rooted in the past. Their traditions of worship are ancient. Some of these traditions may seem strange to an outsider.”
Seven years before THE WICKER MAN (1973), J. Lee Thompson’s 1966 occult thriller EYE OF THE DEVIL cast the clandestine primitivism and unfettered sensuality of fictional pagan worship across the big screen in striking chiaroscuro. When a French nobleman (David Niven) is urgently summoned to his ancestral estate to contend with failing crops, his concerned wife (Deborah Kerr) follows with their two children, only to be plummeted into a hallucinatory nightmare of malevolent witchcraft and deadly ritual. Sharon Tate makes her effortless feature film debut as the mysterious estate sorceress, while Donald Pleasance brilliantly smolders as the lurking high priest of Bellenac and its many foreboding rites.
EYE OF THE DEVIL is a liminal folk horror noir that is perfectly poised at the threshold of genre; the threshold of codified filmmaking technique and the brave new world of experimental expressionism; the threshold of monochrome celluloid and the technicolor explosion that was just on the horizon (this would be the final b/w film produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer); and, perhaps in retrospect, the threshold of uncomplicated innocence and the catastrophic upheaval that was coming down fast by the late 1960s. “What was that ceremony up there in the tower?”
Join Wyrd War for our Seventh Annual Walpurgisnacht Film Festival this Saturday April 30 and uncover the dread secret of…EYE OF THE DEVIL! Tickets on sale HERE.
Saturday April 30, 2022
7:30pm
