Malefice Documentary

[Heron Mathis]

DirectorBilly Lewis's documentary Malefice: A True Story of a Demonic Haunting has been released exclusively through ScareNetwork.tv, where it's now available to rent for the price of $3.99 or purchase for $5.99. Jason Hewlett of The Paranormal Network has already watched the movie, and has released a video review that you can see in the embed above. Hit play and find out what he thought of Malefice: A True Story of a Demonic Haunting!

Featuring Ralph Sarchie, the demonologist and retired NYPD Sergeant whose story inspired the 2014 Scott Derrickson film Deliver Us from Evil, where he was played by Eric Bana (watch that movie HERE), Malefice: A True Story of a Demonic Haunting has the following synopsis:

In this harrowing documentary we get the true story from Abby herself on the tremendous amount of bad repercussions that come with dabbling in black magic and entering a dark world that is not of this earth. Can she overcome the Devil Down South?

Letchworth Village in Haverstraw, New York is considered by many to be one of the most haunted abandoned asylums in the world. We go inside the decrepit walls of Letchworth and gather undeniable paranormal evidence that backs up the dark history of this place and will have the staunchest non-believer scratching their head.

Though I was successful in locating Etienne Prier's MEURTRES EN 45 TOURS and English subtitles online, I remained very curious about the English dubbed version MURDER AT 45 RPM, which was briefly distributed here in the United States by MGM before everyone forgot it ever existed. Happily, I found a listing for it at Sinister Cinema and placed an order, which arrived just yesterday.

Based on a novel (AU COEUR PERDU) translated into English as HEART TO HEART, the film stars Danielle Darrieux, Jean Servais (THE DEVIL'S NIGHTMARE) and Michel Auclair as the usual romantic triangle, this time with Servais as the sadistic husband, who doubles as composer for Darrieux's star vocalist. In the standard Boileau-Narcejac situation, one of them is murdered and taunts the surviving suspects through a series of anonymously mailed recordings. Servais is especially good, somewhat reminiscent of Paul Meurisse in DIABOLIQUE, but the plot is a little too familiar and Prier's uninspired direction makes the film almost appear to have been shot for television, with fades-to-black like commercial breaks after almost every key scene. There is also a preponderance of static shots of characters watching television and driving from one place to another; it's simply not very cinematic. To make matters still more stale, the musical aspect of the film was already somewhat old-fashioned even at the time it was made. Aside from the pop music angle, the basic score of the film by Yves Claou is pleasingly white-knuckled.

Despite these glum factors, I'm glad I grabbed this dubbed version because the English print is like a deep, nostalgic immersion into what the Late, Late Show used to be like when I was a kid falling in love with all those mysterious European films in the 1960s. This one doesn't bill Titra but it was very much one of their jobs, with Bernie Grant and Joyce Gordon voicing the principals, with (I think) George Gonneau dubbing at least one of the men so that Bernie didn't have to dub them all. Just the strange, canned sound of this old movie gave me the warm and fuzzies.

The same circumstances roughly befell Decoin's MALFICES - based on the 1961 novel of the same name, translated as SPELLS OF EVIL - whose grandly evocative title was obliterated by Paramount when they issued the film to US theaters in the summer of 1963 as a B-title under the vague, bland moniker WHERE THE TRUTH LIES (not to be confused with the 2005 Atom Egoyan feature). I was very pleased to discover an excellent quality, widescreen French-language version with hard English subtitles available for viewing or downloading from the website Cave of Forgotten Films.

What I found most pleasing about MALFICES is that it perpetuates the pensive, off-kilter look of DIABOLIQUE and EYES WITHOUT A FACE and so feels very much part of their atmospheric unity. It is photographed in luscious anamorphic black-and-white by Marcel Grignon, also responsible for the memorable THE BLONDE WITCH (LA SORCIRE, 1956, with Marina Vlady), Roger Vadim's LES LIASONS DANGEREUSE (1959) and VICE AND VIRTUE (1963), and the first two entries in Andre Hunebelle's FANTMAS trilogy (1964-65). The opening aerial shots of the protagonist's Citron 2CV puttering across the long stretch of the continental passage anticipate the main titles of THE SHINING, as the night shots of the insect-like vehicle flash us back to Franju - as does Rauchelle's first interaction with the leopard, which is remarkable and not at all what we are led to expect. Juliette Grco - who was, of course, also a singer who received much publicity for her love life with various celebrities - is perfectly believable as the witchy femme fatale, fed up with living in the mausoleum-like castle of the last man she destroyed and exerting all her influence to tempt our unambitious, untravelled hero into abandoning his marriage and joining her on a romantic voyage to parts unknown. As in all of Boileau-Narcejac's work, we are led into believing many things about our story until its weird illusions are dismantled by cold logic in the final stretch, but this one leaves certain aspects of the uncanny open to question and even belief. Also notable is a nerve-scraping musique concrte score by Pierre Henry that keeps the nervous system leaning forward to the edge of one's seat with an ironic, admiring smile on one's face. In retrospect, MALFICES stands out as an antecedent of Damiano Damiani's eerily modernistic THE WITCH IN LOVE (LA STREGHE, 1966), based on Carlos Fuentes' novella AURA - another sometimes overlooked achievement that ranks with the best Euro Gothics. It deserves to be much better-known, so here is your chance.

Nothing would please me more than to learn that a Blu-ray box set of BOILEAU-NARCEJAC movies was in the works. As Juliette Greco's Myriem would know, sometimes putting the thought out there can make it happen.

This handsomely packaged box set proclaims "This Is Horror!" but it's actually a little bit of everything exploitative: it's got monsters, it's got swamp adventures, it's got cautionary tales about drugs and alcohol, it's got rock and country, it's got Rooney Kerwin, it's even got Rita Hayworth on her way down - and I would wager from the looks of it that at least some of it was 16mm blown up to 35. It's all presided over by the dean of Florida movie exploitation, William "Wild Bill" Gref, whom Herschell Gordon called "a titan" and David F. Friedman (rarely a humble man) called "the best of us." Included here are such drive-in confections as STING OF DEATH (1965) and its original co-feature DEATH CURSE OF TARTU (1966), THE HOOKED GENERATION (1968), THE NAKED ZOO (1970, with Rita Hayworth), THE PSYCHEDELIC PRIEST aka ELECTRIC SHADES OF GREY (made 1971, unreleased until 2001), MAKO: JAWS OF DEATH (1976) and WHISKEY MOUNTAIN (1977), along with a newly "expanded" (now two hours plus) edition of Daniel Griffith's 2016 documentary, THEY CAME FROM THE SWAMP: THE FILMS OF WILLIAM GREF (2020).

I've never heard of this movie (Warren William's penultimate film, a contemporary retelling of Dostoevsky's CRIME AND PUNISHMENT directed by Alfred Zeisler), but the then-innovative ad campaign points the way to Hitchcock's PSYCHO and William Castle's HOMICIDAL some 15 years earlier - when an advertisement could get away with misspelling "psycho" because the term hadn't quite yet been defined in the manner it would be. To the best of my knowledge, FEAR is never mentioned in overviews of horror and suspense cinema - but this ad certainly offers it a seat at the table maybe even a place of honor at its turning point, if only in salesmanship.

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