Being Film #4 for Hooptober 2024
Now this is something I can get behind. Dario Argento may have lost a step or two personally since his heyday ended around 1985 (I’ll go so far as 1987 with Opera) but the man could find and nurture talent, and one of the best was Michele Soavi. I was a huge fan of Stagefright, his earlier giallo, and everyone should go and check out the insanity of Dellamorte Dellamore (aka Cemetery Man). Now we’re here with The Sect, aka The Devil’s Daughter, and despite some significant parallels with last entry’s Humanoids From The Deep (this is basically a riff on Rosemary’s Baby) including a bizarre impregnation scene, everything about Soavi’s horror works like a disturbing dream. Does it make sense? Not really. Does it look tremendous? You bet – this thing has style to spare.
THE QUICK SUMMARY: It’s the 70s in California with a bunch of hippies when some dude steps out of the desert spouting Stones lyrics. Real deep, man…until the dude ritually kills the entire commune in the name of the black goat of the wood, you know? Fast forward to the 90s and Miriam is just going about her day when she nearly runs over an old man and a mysterious box. She brings him home (never a good idea) and weird things start to happen. What’s with the blue stuff in the water? Why did that guy kill someone and literally steal her heart? Dude…DID THAT BUG GO UP HER NOSE?! Next thing you know there are secret tunnels, more murders, the dead rising up, and oh yeah: the coming of the Anti-Christ. Didn’t I tell you in the intro this was a riff on Rosemary’s Baby? Except the Devil is a stork, not John Cassavettes. You read that right: a stork. In other words, shit’s about to get WEIRD.
Soavi has a great sense of color, and he delights in accenting it throughout The Sect, signaling a shift into the otherworldly as Miriam is drawn deeper and deeper into the madness of the cult bringing about the Antichrist. There’s also plenty of rabbit to signal her Alice-like descent – subtlety thy name is most assuredly NOT Soavi. That’s fine, because the man knows how to wring out tension and Lynchian (yeah, I know it’s a tired phrase) dream imagery in his films. Thought it wasn’t Lynch but Russell – Ken Russell to be exact who I thought of when watching one terrific sequence in the film where Miriam dreams of trying to untie a man crucified to a tree only to be then tied to said tree in a great little bit of off-perceptive as something comes crawling up her nightgown. Super creepy and off-kilter in the best possible way.
The Sect also has some truly good performances in the way of Kelly Curtis as Miriam. The older sister of Jamie Lee Curtis, you can see small glimpses of the resemblance, but Kelly relies on her own bag of acting tricks, and is never not believable as the woman trying to live a normal life who cannot help but be pulled into this madness. Likewise Herbert Low as the sinister Meobius who initiates the entire proceedings and doesn’t let a small thing like his death earlier in the film stop him from his infernal machinations.
And now a word about the use of rape in a horror film. Because trigger warning: this does have Miriam impregnated by the Devil in the guise of the enormous stork in the header image. Soavi plays with shadow (there’s a great shot of an angel with what can only be described as an ENORMOUS hose between his legs) and innuendo (small quick shots of a giant bird flapping and moving in front of Miriam) to show the act and its consequences. It’s integral to the plot, doesn’t exploit the actress, and has enough artistic merit to work as both story point and visual flourish. Now to be clear, it’s also very, very disturbing: there are things the stork does to Miriam’s neck that…well, you’ll just have to see it.
A really fun ride that works great as both a devil worship/cult film and a sterling example of what Italian grind cinema was getting up to after its seeming demise in the 80s. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going back to watch Cemetery Man again…
Cinema Dual 
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