Dis­cov­er the eco-hor­ror of this eeri­ly pre­scient crea­ture feature

Prophe­cy opens with three sequences that togeth­er estab­lish its themes. In the first, a search-and-res­cue team in the Maine woods, out at night look­ing for miss­ing lum­ber­jacks, them­selves come under vio­lent attack from some­one – or some­thing – in the dark. A tableau of the corpse-strewn scene the fol­low­ing morn­ing is accom­pa­nied by clas­si­cal music, which bleeds irra­tional­ly into the sec­ond sequence, as Mag­gie Verne (Talia Shire) per­forms the piece in an orches­tra before a monied, urban audi­ence, and after­wards, dis­cuss­es with a fel­low cel­list her reluc­tance to reveal to her hus­band that she is pregnant.

In the third sequence, just as Maggie’s hus­band Robert (Robert Fox­worth), a com­mit­ted if frus­trat­ed pub­lic health work­er, com­plains of the ​‘futil­i­ty’ of being ​“strict­ly a rat bite and gas leak man” in a neglect­ed ghet­to envi­ron­ment where noth­ing ever changes, he is approached to com­pile an Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion report that could resolve a volatile dis­pute between Native Amer­i­cans and a paper mill com­pa­ny. Robert heads into the wilder­ness with Mag­gie, hop­ing for once to be able to make a difference.

Indeed, the polar­i­ties intro­duced here – nature vs cul­ture, ide­al­ism vs cyn­i­cism, human vs beast, indi­genes vs colonis­ers, preg­nant hopes vs mater­nal anx­i­eties – will all con­tin­ue to clash and hybridise through­out John Frankenheimer’s eco-hor­ror, which, like George McCowan’s Frogs, William Girdler’s Day of the Ani­mals and Col­in Eggleston’s Long Week­end, con­cerns not just one mon­strous crea­ture enact­ing nature’s revenge, but a whole ecosys­tem full of them (freak­ish fish, rag­ing rac­coons, etc), lead­ing all the way up the food chain to the apex predator.

At the heart of this ani­mal apoc­a­lypse is a very human ten­sion, as the lum­ber­men, led by Mr Isley (Richard Dysart), pin all the dis­ap­pear­ances and deaths on the angry insur­rec­tion of the ​“orig­i­nal peo­ples” (or ​‘Opies’), while those Natives Amer­i­cans, led by John Hawks (Armand Assante) under the guid­ance of elder Hec­tor M’Rai (George Clute­si), attribute them to the venge­ful giant for­est spir­it Katahdin (in fact invent­ed for the film and named after a local moun­tain). Caught between two groups whose ide­olo­gies are at aggres­sive log­ger­heads, Robert starts sus­pect­ing that the real prob­lem may be illic­it pol­lut­ing by the lum­ber com­pa­ny, and its muto­genic effects on the near­by flo­ra and fauna.

The beau­ti­ful Maine forest­land that forms the prin­ci­pal loca­tion of Prophe­cy is far from vir­gin, its defile­ment vis­i­ble in the bar­ren scars left by log­ging – a potent image that cap­tures the eco­log­i­cal strug­gle key to the film, much as, in the mid­dle of this Gar­den of Eden, the paper mill is a smoke-belch­ing hell. Here, as des­e­crat­ed moth­er nature births crea­tures of Eraser­head-like grotes­querie, Mag­gie grows ever more ner­vous about what might be grow­ing inside her now that she has eat­en the local fish, with David Seltzer’s screen­play high­light­ing the inti­mate inter­con­nec­tion between human­i­ty and the environment.

Soon, as hor­rif­ic evi­dence of what is hap­pen­ing in the woods, Mag­gie will be car­ry­ing an alto­geth­er dif­fer­ent baby, while its fero­cious, mal­formed moth­er – inspi­ra­tion for the most ter­ri­fy­ing crea­ture in Alex Garland’s Anni­hi­la­tion – goes on a mur­der­ous ram­page to get back its own.

Per­haps the most inter­est­ing char­ac­ter here is Isley. He is osten­si­bly the vil­lain of the piece, ulti­mate­ly respon­si­ble for all that has gone wrong. But his errors are more by omis­sion than com­mis­sion, as he turns a blind eye to the tox­ic mis­deeds of his sub­con­trac­tors. Asked by Robert if he knew about the chem­i­cals being pumped into the area’s water sys­tem, Isley replies, ​“I didn’t want to”. And so he cap­tures the wil­ful igno­rance of us all as glob­al cat­a­stro­phes of our own col­lec­tive mak­ing edge ever closer.

Robert’s final report is writ­ten, not unlike the script for this film, on thou­sands of paper pages of the kind that the mill pro­duces as cheap­ly as pos­si­ble. Instead of demon­is­ing Isley, the film impli­cates all ​‘civil­i­sa­tion’ in his sins, and even allows him a cli­mac­tic moment of redemp­tive enno­ble­ment – although, sig­nif­i­cant­ly, it comes as too lit­tle far too late and has lit­er­al­ly no effect on anything.

Beyond the title, the word ​‘prophe­cy’ is nev­er actu­al­ly men­tioned in Frankenheimer’s fea­ture. Yet one sus­pects that the word marks the film’s sta­tus as pre­dic­tive para­ble, offer­ing a fore­warn­ing of the dis­as­ter towards which we are all rac­ing. Now that, some four decades after Prophe­cy was orig­i­nal­ly made, we are that much clos­er to a reck­on­ing for the dam­age that we have done to our earth, this crea­ture fea­ture now looks ever more prophet­ic. What it has to say about the awful con­se­quences of our actions as a species is a bit­ter pill to swal­low, or a hard mes­sage to bear.

Prophe­cy is avail­able on Blu-ray via Eure­ka Enter­tain­ment from 16 August.