Trick or Trailers: Deadly Blessing (1981)

I don't recall ever seeing the trailer to 1981's Deadly Blessing prior to its release. It just never played in front of any movies I saw at the time. But I can tell you this, I sure as shit saw all the TV spots for it.

One damned commercial in particular always seemed to know when I was alone in the house and it would ambush me every time and every time I was convinced this movie was far too evil for me to deal with.

Someone had gone and made a movie that was the devil personified.

Check it out:



See? Pretty evil, right?

Well, maybe you can't see it but when I was twelve, I sure saw it!

I saw it and I couldn't unsee it. Pure evil burned into film.

Oddly enough, the actual theatrical trailer - you know, the one that typically screened before grown adults who were ready to handle it - isn't nearly as ominous as that TV spot that any innocent pair of eyes could be exposed to.

For comparison's sake, here's the trailer:



Ok, pretty scary. But the TV spot is so much worse!

I didn't even have to watch the commercial to be scared by it. And believe me, many times I didn't watch it because I would run out of the room when it came on. But could hear it! That evil background music playing under the equally evil narration was enough to have me shaking.

"More chilling than nightmares. Blacker than the darkest corners of your mind. There is the unholiest terror of all. Deadly Blessing. Rated R."

The fact that it ended with "Rated R" is really what sealed the deal for me. That was back when I was genuinely intimidated by R-rated movies (what can I say, I was a very fragile young person). Some R-rated movies didn't automatically cause me to cower in fear at the mere thought of them but Deadly Blessing sure did. It seemed to be operating on a whole other level than, say Friday the 13th Part 2.

I think the main thing that threw me about Deadly Blessing is that, unlike most horror movies at the time, it wasn't a slasher movie. I couldn't immediately wrap my mind around what it was even about.

When I would see a commercial or a trailer for a slasher movie, I instantly got what it was. Someone in a mask and carrying a knife or an axe was chasing someone. And that's pretty scary, sure, but I can comprehend what I'm being scared of. I didn't have that luxury with Deadly Blessing. The fact that the commercial was so vague as to what was going on made it so much worse. I just got the impression of an unseen evil force stalking people and I couldn't handle it, man!

Another year or so down the road, though, and the spell that horror movies could cast on me was broken. I became old enough to still be excited for them, to still expect to be scared at times but they were now...just movies, you know? But in 1981, I was still young enough and naive enough to feel like a movie could be more than a movie, that it could be something crafted in a dark place by wicked hands, capable of taking you somewhere you didn't want to go.

I kind of miss that feeling. We all get jaded eventually, it's just the natural course of things. You can't say wide-eyed forever. But that brief time in your life when you were, that's a blessing to remember.

Retro-Shock Theater: Deadly Blessing (1981)

Director Wes Craven has made horror history many times over and, most impressively, done so over the course of several decades. He first changed the landscape of horror in the ‘70s with The Last House on the Left (1972), then in the ‘80s with A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), and again in the ‘90s with Scream (1996). With all due respect to those seminal shockers, though, my own personal favorites from Craven’s catalog tend to be the less heralded ones. Number #1 for me is 1981’s oddball offering Deadly Blessing.

Released at the height of the slasher craze, Deadly Blessing employed some stock elements that were already over-familiar from the sub-genre – a rising body count, macabre deaths, menacing POV shots, multiple red herrings, nubile females in peril (including a young Sharon Stone in her first film role), and, of course, the killer’s identity is concealed until the climax.

In those ways, Deadly Blessing is easily identifiable as a horror film that came out in the same year as Happy Birthday to Me and Graduation Day. It bears well-worn earmarks of the slasher genre that place it in its particular era. But beyond those familiar riffs, Deadly Blessing is much more idiosyncratic than the routine slashers that it shared marquee space with in ’81.

Set in an idyllic rural area, Deadly Blessing tells the story of Jim and Martha (Doug Barr and Maren Jensen), a loving young couple who have a testy relationship with an Amish-like religious sect called the Hittites that lives next to their property. Doug used to be a Hittite himself but he left the sect to marry Martha, earning the eternal wrath of his father Isaiah (Ernest Borgnine), who also happens to be the Hittite’s inflexible leader. Isaiah considers Jim to be an abomination in the eyes of God now and he forbids any of his people to communicate with him, including Jim’s mother and two younger brothers (the oldest of which is played by Jeff East, from Craven’s 1978 TV movie Summer of Fear).

The bad blood between Jim and his family goes forever unresolved as Jim falls victim to a mysterious “accident” while alone in his barn late one night, crushed to death by a tractor. Once news of the tragedy reaches them, Martha’s best friends – Lana (Sharon Stone) and Vicky (Susan Buckner) – come to support her in her time of grieving. On top of the tension brought by having a whole trio of liberated modern women roaming the countryside under the Hittite’s disapproving watch, there is also the matter of a killer being on the loose.

Even though Jim’s death is believed to be an accident, a mysterious figure in the barn that night was the one that loosened the tractor. And in true slasher movie fashion, whoever the killer might be, they could be one of a whole range of possible suspects. Is it the stern Isaiah, out to cleanse the world one sinner at a time? Is it William Gluntz, the strange young Hittite (played by Hills Have Eyes poster boy Michael Berryman) who shows a proclivity for being a Peeping Tom? (It’s doubtful that any genre fan would peg Gluntz as the killer – he’s a true slasher movie red herring a la Robert Silverman’s Prom Night janitor).

Or in some strange, psychological twist could it even be Martha herself?

If you haven’t seen Deadly Blessing yet, save your guesses about the outcome – it’s impossible to anticipate where this movie is going, except to say that the makers of 1983’s cult fave Sleepaway Camp might have been taking notes. As much as the killer’s reveal is an unexpected doozy, Craven manages to top that craziness by dropping a supernatural element (mandated by the studio) in at – literally – the last minute.

Not everything gels in Deadly Blessing but it scores points for being different – even at the cost of logic – and it has a couple of scary sequences that rank among Craven’s best. At a time when horror films were very much carbon copies of each other, Deadly Blessing had its own quirky angles to play.

An important component that ties Deadly Blessing’s scattershot nature together is the score by James Horner, then at an early point in his career but soon to become one of the most popular composers in Hollywood (despite his Oscar for Titanic, he’s probably best known to genre fans for his Aliens score). At a time when many horror films, especially low budget ones, had scores that simply mimicked Carpenter’s work on Halloween, Horner gave Deadly Blessing a creepy Omen-esque score, marked by ominous chanting.

Even though Deadly Blessing has been an often overlooked entry in Craven’s filmography and even though Craven is not the sole author of the screenplay (he shares credit with Matthew Barr and Glenn M. Benest), the clash of cultures embodied by the conflict between the Hittites and the “serpents” of the modern world places it on common thematic ground with Craven’s other work wherein different families or communities find themselves at deadly odds with each other (witness the degenerate Krug and co. vs. the accommodating middle class Collingwoods in Last House or the irradiated mutants vs. the vacationing Carter family – one “nuclear” family against another – in The Hills Have Eyes).

Deadly Blessing also comes across as something of a dry run for A Nightmare on Elm Street. Not only is an eerie dream sequence involving Lana the film’s most memorable moment (immortalized on Deadly Blessing’s poster) but there is also a suspenseful scene in which Martha is imperiled in a bathtub that Craven would restage in the first Elm Street.

Not really a hit at the time and kind of forgotten about today, even by many genre fans, Deadly Blessing nonetheless made an impression. Memorable episodes of both Friday the 13th: The Series (“The Quilt of Hathor”) and The X-Files (“Genderbender”) show an obvious debt to its influence, with each involving eerie goings on in strictly religious communities. Now that Scream Factory is due to be blessing fans with a Special Edition Blu-Ray of this film (due January 22nd), hopefully it will finally garner the larger fanbase that it deserves.

Originally published 1/14/13 at Shock Till You Drop

Summer Shocks 1981: Deadly Blessing

When I was in junior high, I had a friend whose parents were way more permissive than mine when it came to R-rated movies. I couldn't even see them on cable but this kid saw all the new horror releases on the big screen. When we got together at the beginning of school in the fall of '81, the first movie I asked him about was Deadly Blessing. The TV spots and newspaper ads for it had terrified me over the last month of summer vacation and I had to know if I was right to be pissing in my pants over it. Having gone to the drive-in to see it with his parents, he assured me that it was one of the best horror movies he had ever seen, reserving high praise for the spider-in-the-mouth dream sequence.

When I finally saw the movie for myself on VHS, I was not disappointed. It remains such a terrific shocker (rewatching it just the other week, there was a 'gotcha' scare involving Sharon Stone's character in a barn that 'got me' so badly - even though I knew it was coming - that I damn near sprained my neck!) and it's such a key movie in Wes Craven's filmography (bringing dream imagery into his work in a big way) that I'm puzzled as to why it hasn't been given a Region 1 DVD release.

Whatever the reason for its absence on disc, here's hoping that one day it'll get the exposure - and the wider fanbase - it deserves.

To read my full Deadly Blessing review click here.