You'll have to excuse that subject line; I've topped off my evening's viewing with some BEANY & CECIL cartoons and the puns are pouring out of me.
But it's a true enough analogy when it comes to the movie I chose for my evening's main viewing, Amando de Ossorio's EXORCIST rip-off DEMON WITCH CHILD [LA ENDEMONIADA, 1975], which arrived here on VHS many years ago under the Dostoevskian moniker THE POSSESSED. This tape has been in my attic for about twenty years, watched only once, and I was delighted to find that time had stood still in terms of the tape itself; it still plays like it was brand new. The last time I saw DEMON WITCH CHILD, I merely thought it was bad, so I'm even more delighted to discover that my response to the movie today, twenty years further on, is conspicuously richer and more complex. I'm going to write it up for VW's "Things From the Attic" department, so I'm not going to review it here, but I do feel like previewing some of my thoughts on how this film has dated.
If you haven't seen it -- and there's not many opportunities to do so, as it's never turned up on cable, laserdisc or DVD -- it's the story of an old witch, Mother Gaultier ("the Mother of the Old Ones"), who leaps to her death through a glass window after being arrested for the abduction of an infant required by her coven's human sacrifice. (You know that comic "crashing" sound effect? It actually accompanies Mother Gaultier's suicide, right down to the sound of the plate rattling to a standstill.) In turn, her spirit possesses the body of the police commissioner's daughter, Susan. Before you know it, Susan (played by Marián Salgado, who was 11 or 12 at the time but looks somewhat older, thanks to her sexily cascading hair) is questioning the status quo, criticizing the hypocracies of her elders, sneering at the terminally staid, and startling everyone with words like "shit" and "fuck." Her governess (Lone Fleming, from the first two BLIND DEAD pictures) wails, "Her friends couldn't have taught her such words!"
My friends, welcome to the Twilight Zone. The amazing thing about DEMON WITCH CHILD is that, if you look past Susan's levitation (where the tracks doing the lift are in plain sight) and her transformation into Mother Gaultier and her spider-walk down the outside of her house (during which her skirt curiously defies gravity), everything this demonically-possessed child does to arouse terror in the hearts of her parents, caregivers, and local clergy would pass for standard behavior in an American child of her age in the year 2006!
This was 1975, of course. THE LAWRENCE WELK SHOW (or its Spanish equivalent) was still on the air. GIRLS GONE WILD, gangsta rap, and FEAR FACTOR were still no more than glints in the eyes of future pioneers of the arts. It was a different world then. But that doesn't make it any less amazing that, seen today, DEMON WITCH CHILD is only a scene or two removed from a straightforward cautionary tale about the generation gap. In fact, while watching it, I was often less alarmed by the doings of the kid with the snotty attitude than by the ultraconservative, reactionary ways of the adults who encircled her like so many prison bars. That is, until she kills and castrates one of them, and gift-wraps the severed genitals as a present for the victim's girlfriend. That's when Ossorio's movie lets you know, in case you still haven't caught on (as I hadn't), that it's not actually subversive entertainment and has every intention of siding with the grown-ups. Of course, it's possible that the English dubbed version is a travesty and that the original Spanish version is a more sober viewing experience, but I doubt it.
If 35 mm prints of DEMON WITCH CHILD could be found, it might well be the title that could revive the '70s phenomenon of the Midnight Movie. There's nothing that REEFER MADNESS or DAMAGED LIVES have that it doesn't have, and the lousy dubbing adds considerably to its pleasures. I'm in no particular rush to watch my tape of DEMON WITCH CHILD again... but I can't wait to tell my friends about it, and it would be an evening to remember to see it some night in a darkened auditorium with a bunch of of stoned kids out past their curfews.
Would you like to know more? Okay.
Here's a link to an amusing "visual examination" of the film I found online.
And in case you're wondering what Marián Salgado is doing today... incredibly, she's a blogger in Madrid! Her blog is in Spanish of course, and her only entry to date (from what I can understand of it) is sad and possibly tragic in nature; that said, she does seem to be reaching out to others by posting such a message, so I would urge you to proceed there only with the best and kindest of intentions. (And please write to me of anything you find out.) Naturally, I don't hold Ms. Salgado responsible for the shortcomings or the silliness of DEMON WITCH CHILD -- I rather enjoyed her in it -- and her only other movie credit is attached to one of the great classics of Spanish horror: Narcisco Ibañez-Serrador's WOULD YOU KILL A CHILD? aka ISLAND OF THE DAMNED (1976). I sincerely wish her well.
