Trick or Trailers: The Legacy (1978)

It's that time of year again! Time to blow the accumulated dust off this blog and celebrate the season, Trick or Trailers style! I did think about letting it go this year but, you know, some traditions shouldn't be allowed to die!

I've been doing this yearly column so long that, honestly, I can't remember which movies I've already gotten to by now but I have a feeling I haven't covered 1978's The Legacy yet so I'm going with it!



While the '70s are known for the iconic likes of Halloween, The Exorcist, The Hills Have Eyes, The Omen, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Alien, and other mainstays of the genre, as a kid in the '70s, my perception of the decade's horror offerings was very different. For me, all the classics I just mentioned were completely out of reach. Thanks to a protective mother, I wasn't even able to see Jaws!

My horror diet in the '70s was very much PG and G-rated, and was mostly limited to whatever aired on commercial television. That's fine by me because just keeping things on that level was enough to have me frequently scared shitless.

In my child's eye view of '70s horror, the decade's heavy hitters weren't John Carpenter or George Romero, they were Bert I. Gordon and whatever dude directed The Car.

I wasn't an educated consumer back then, let's say. I couldn't differentiate between movies on grounds of their likely quality, which was actually nice. For me, going by TV spots and newspaper ads and not being old enough to read or care about reviews yet, something like Halloween was on the same playing field as Kingdom of the Spiders and held equal weight. A scary movie was just a scary movie.

So the fact that The Legacy was actually regarded as being pretty lame didn't register with me at all as a kid. All I knew was that the commercials freaked me out. So when the opportunity came to check out The Legacy when it came to TV a couple of years later when it premiered on The ABC Friday Night Movie, I was stoked, believe me.

The Legacy definitely lived up to my expectations with an eerie premise and some big scares (the scene where a swimmer dies in an indoor swimming pool when the surface of the water inexplicably turns solid terrified me). As far as I was concerned, it was as good a horror movie as I'd ever seen. That it was already a half-forgotten piece of schlock by the time I watched it would have been news to me.

In our internet age, where every place you look someone is slagging something that someone else loves, I wonder if people can still have that innocent time in their life when it comes to movies anymore. I hope so. To have those simpler times to bond with films without picking them to pieces is where a love of movies is able to take root.

Once it does, all the cynicism that comes later can't pull that loose.

The Legacy

In 1978, a new era in horror was ushered in thanks to two trend-setting classics - Halloween and Dawn of the Dead. But while those and several other films from that year (such as Philip Kaufman's incisive Me Decade Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake and Joe Dante's spirited Jaws rip-off Piranha) went on to enjoy lasting legacies among horror fans, a genre picture from 1978 that ironically found itself forgotten almost immediately upon its release is a film titled The Legacy.

First of all, when a horror movie sports a mellow ballad sung by Kiki Dee (a singer who achieved her greatest fame with the Elton John duet “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart”) as its theme song, it’s inevitably going to have a hard time going head to head with the kind of landmark horror efforts that 1978 was famous for. And yet, whenever I hear Dee’s soothing vocal on “Another Side of Me” at the start of The Legacy, it instantly transports me back to a blissful, earlier time.

1978 was still a few years too soon for me to be seeing R-rated horror movies in the theaters so my first viewing of The Legacy came courtesy of The ABC Friday Night Movie (I’m guessing that The Legacy would’ve had its TV premiere by ’80 or '81). Young horror fans raised in an era of cable and home video probably can't imagine having to wait as long as a few years after a film’s theatrical release to finally see it in their homes – and then to have to watch an edited version complete with commercial interruptions – but The ABC Friday Night Movie (which aired from '75 to '83) was where I first saw many of my favorite horror films from the late ‘70s/early ‘80s like the '78 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the '77 Island of Dr. Moreau, Kingdom of the Spiders, Coma, The Shining, The Car and The Fog - and all of them fueled my burgeoning horror fandom.

Before having the privilege of seeing these semi-recent films, my primary exposure to horror movies was with the older classics that ran on The 4 O’Clock Movie, Monday-Friday as part of Connecticut-based Channel 30's station library. Those movies instilled a lasting love of horror in me but it was The ABC Friday Night Movie that allowed me to feel like I was starting to catch up with the times.

Thanks to my mother not being willing to (or not having the extra cash to) purchase genre magazines like Fangoria or Starlog which covered the current genre scene, I knew very little about The Legacy or any other contemporary horror films (I don't remember my mother having a newspaper subscription when I was younger either - so reviews were out, too). Any reading involving horror movies was limited to whatever books were available at the school or local library and those usually stopped short of offering any info on movies later than the early '60s - so learning about recent films wasn't easy. For me, with so little hard info to go on, The Legacy had every chance to be as good as a movie like, say, The Shining. I had almost no notion back then on what newer horror films had to offer.

In The Legacy (scripted by Hammer vet Jimmy Sangster and directed by Richard Marquand, who would go on to helm Return of the Jedi), Katherine Ross and Sam Elliot play a couple who travel to England for a high-paying interior decorating gig. Once there, they’re involved in a rural motorcycle accident and while they wait for the needed repairs, they become guests at a strange gathering within the walls of the wealthy estate of Jason Mountolive (John Standing). Other guests arrive during their stay (including Rocky Horror Picture Show's Charles Gray and The Who's Roger Daltry) and it soon becomes apparent that something deeply sinister is taking place. All the other guests have achieved impossible wealth in their own various fields, they seem to all belong to some sort of secret order, and when Ross and Elliot repeatedly try to leave the estate, something always keeps the pair from escaping.

On top of that, these well-to-do guests on the estate grounds are being killed off one by one in events that look like accidents but are really (surprise!) the handiwork of malevolent supernatural forces. What is Ross’ connection with these people and why does her destiny seem tied both to this estate and with the incredibly ancient and putrefying form that lingers behind the drapes of a hospital bed in a specialized chamber? All those questions and and more are answered (not answered well, perhaps, but answers are still provided) before the credits roll on The Legacy.

To watch The Legacy now only prompts me to wonder what about it originally held my interest. Even though characters are being bumped off steadily throughout the course of the film, outside of a young woman swimming in an indoor pool who suddenly finds that the entire surface of the water has inexplicably turned solid – forcing her to stay under and drown – none of the character deaths in The Legacy deliver the kind of ghoulish, gut-grabbing flourishes that '70s audiences who had already made the spectacular Omen films into hits would've expected (Damien: Omen 2 was released earlier in '78).

Ultimately, The Legacy is just bland and most of the film's suspense involves Ross and Elliot’s stymied attempts to escape the grounds of the estate. And there's a bizarre happy ending as well where Ross inherits satanic powers but both she and Elliot seem to regard this development as just another of life's curious adventures.

For all its shortcomings, I can’t deny that The Legacy left a lasting mark on me. Until now, though, I found myself having a hard time saying why. But then I realized that about a year or so after seeing The Legacy was when my eyes became newly opened to the splatter era and I became a regular reader of Fangoria as well. Almost overnight I hit adolescence and became a gorehound. And as I look around my house now at the scattered discs and screeners readily available to watch - titles that proudly push the boundaries of cinematic violence like Inside, Frontière(s) and Mother of Tears, the simple reason finally dawned on me why The Legacy still lingers on in my imagination:

It reminds me of a time - the last time in my life - when I needed so little horror from my horror movies.