Deadly Blessing
1981Dir. Wes Craven
Wes Craven burst onto the horror scene in the 1970s with his distinctive brand of thought-provoking, gritty, survivalist horror titles Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes (both of which have been remade, with the former's 'reimagination' due in cinemas any day now). Before the success of A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984, Craven directed a number of films including the made-for-TV Linda Blair-starring witch-flick Summer of Fear, and an adaptation of DC Comic’s Swamp Thing. In between these two films, Craven directed Deadly Blessing, a barmy yet haunting tale of fanaticism, obsession and fear. Among others, it starred Sharon Stone in one of her earliest roles.
When her husband dies in a suspicious slow-motion tractor accident, Martha (Maren Jensen) is visited by her two friends from the city. They are unsettled that Martha lives right next to an austere religious community of Hittites ('They make the Amish look like swingers'), led by the fearsome and ill-tempered Isaiah (Ernest Borgnine), whom Marsha believes had a hand in her husband's mysterious death. They try to convince her to sell up and return to the city with them, where she won't be as isolated or threatened by religious zealots. A number of the young men from the settlement, including hulking William (Michael Berryman – a stalwart of the horror genre), seem to have a morbid fascination with Martha and constantly spy on her. Is this innocent curiosity, or something more threatening and sexual?
Isaiah refers to Martha as ‘the incubus’ and constantly warns his community to stay away from her. It turns out that Martha’s husband was a member of this community, and when he fell in love and married her, he was cast out and ostracised. They view Martha as a diabolical seductress who tempted one of their own away from them. Tension rises from the apparent threat posed to Martha and her friends by Isiah, his nasty, volatile views and influence he wields over the men in his patriarchal, fundamentalist community. They view the women as 'demonic' because they are independent, sexually confident and autonomous. It soon becomes apparent that someone is trying to kill Martha and her friends, and before long, Hittites and ‘nonbelievers’ are indiscriminately butchered by a malevolent assailant.
Deadly Blessing is rife with dichotomies which fuel tension on a subconscious level: religion and secularism, male and female, traditionalism and progressivism. On a more visceral level, it also contains some of the most striking images and concepts that exist in Craven's body of work. Preceding the immensely unsettling bathtub scene in A Nightmare on Elm Street, in which Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) is suddenly pulled under the water by the razor-fingered Fred Kruger in a bizarre blurring of dream and reality, Deadly Blessing also has an infamous bath scene. Here, Martha’s relaxing soak is interrupted by the presence of a snake that has been released by the killer into the tub with her. Another taut and disturbing moment occurs when Martha’s friend Vicky (Susan Buckner) is stuck in a car doused with petrol and desperately trying to reverse away from a rapidly approaching trail of burning fuel.
Craven unleashes more nightmarish chills with a darkly unnerving dream sequence in which clawed hands reach out from the darkness to caress the head of a sleeping Lana (Sharon Stone) while a voice eerily calls out to her, urging her to open her mouth. As she slowly parts her lips and opens her mouth, a spider lowers itself towards her face on a silken strand of web and quietly enters her mouth. This unsettling image displays Craven at his best and demonstrates the director’s interest in the subconscious and dreams. Dreams and dreamlike imagery crop up repeatedly in Craven’s work, and this particular scene is up there with the most disturbing of them…
*Spoilers* Craven makes great use of autumnal settings and the whole film is tinged with a strange melancholy. He carefully builds tension and dread with his mainly restrained direction. Some crafty misdirection also results in a couple of surprising twists, but the screenplay never delves into the religious trauma it so frequently hints at. The batshit climax features several shock twists, including the revelation of a transgender killer, and the studio-imposed ending in which a demon bursts up through Martha’s floorboards and drags her down to hell, verifying that the superstitious Hittites with their talk of an ‘incubus’, were right along.
