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Dis­cov­er the demon­ic plea­sures of this 80s pos­ses­sion horror

25 Feb 2019

Words by Anton Bitel

Dark-haired person reaching out of mist against a dark background, with a bright light source in the distance.
Dark-haired person reaching out of mist against a dark background, with a bright light source in the distance.
Occult thrills abound in direc­tor Cami­lo Vila’s New Orleans-set exor­cism fable The Unholy.

Burt Reynolds used to tell an anec­dote about how his ini­tial dis­ap­point­ment at fail­ing to win the part of Dr David Bow­man in 2001: A Space Odyssey soon turned to grat­i­fi­ca­tion as he learned that Stan­ley Kubrick was look­ing to cast an actor who was in no way inter­est­ing – some­thing no one could pos­si­bly say of Reynolds. Of course, Kubrick was right, and Keir Dullea’s undis­tract­ing blank­ness was per­fect for Bowman.

Ben Cross, per­haps best known for play­ing Harold Abra­hams in Hugh Hudson’s Char­i­ots of Fire, is anoth­er of cinema’s Dul­leas, an actor for whom show­boat­ing histri­on­ics are entire­ly alien, and who there­fore dis­ap­pears not just into his rôles, but even into his films. It is an act­ing style that may bare­ly even reg­is­ter with some view­ers, but it does serves Cross well as the pro­tag­o­nist of Cami­lo Vila’s The Unholy, in which Cross’ every­man – the mes­sian­ic cypher Father John Michael – becomes the unex­pect­ed vehi­cle for all man­ner of myths and mir­a­cles. It prob­a­bly helps that Cross once, aged 12, played Jesus in a school play, and that his very sur­name is a cod­ed sig­ni­fi­er of Chris­t­ian ideology.

The Unholy is a sto­ry about sto­ries. It opens with a priest, Father Den­nis (Ruben Rabasa), being first seduced and then mur­dered by a flame-haired suc­cubus (Nicole Forti­er) at the altar of the St Agnes church in New Orleans. This is quick­ly fol­lowed by anoth­er sequence in which young Father Michael arrives to the scene of a car acci­dent, where a dying stranger address­es him by name and warns him, You’re in dan­ger – she wants you!” (with a graf­fi­ti in the back­ground read­ing, Sui­cides have sex with demons from hell”).

The next sequence, express­ly set three years lat­er, sees Michael pushed from a tall build­ing as he tries to draw jumper Claude (Peter Frechette) back from the edge – but mirac­u­lous­ly sur­viv­ing the fall with­out a sin­gle bone bro­ken, or any injuries what­so­ev­er.” This leads Arch­bish­op Mose­ly (Hal Hol­brook) and old blind Father Sil­va (Trevor Howard, in his last rôle) to believe that Michael is the one” that they have been await­ing, and to assign him, despite his youth, to run the cursed St Agnes (where not one but two priest­ly pre­de­ces­sors had met with sticky ends).

Unfold­ing in rapid suc­ces­sion, these three episodes seem dis­con­nect­ed, demand­ing a degree of active syn­the­sis from the view­er just to make sense of them. They are also sug­ges­tive of the super­nat­ur­al and the mag­i­cal, even if Michael, a some­what wood­en fig­ure who pro­fess­es not to believe in the wilder sto­ries of the Bible or demon mum­bo jum­bo”, grounds every­thing in an earthy real­i­ty. Yet as Michael becomes involved with Mil­lie (Jill Car­roll), a young vir­gin run­away who knew Den­nis and who has fall­en in with a gim­micky club that she describes as Satan­ic, he finds his own life strug­gles of sex­u­al temp­ta­tion and chaste resis­tance play­ing out as both Old and New Tes­ta­ment mythos, as his per­son­al demons assume mon­strous form.

As such, The Unholy, like The Exor­cist before it, locates the obscu­ri­ties of Chris­t­ian doc­trine in the con­tem­po­rary and the every­day. It simul­ta­ne­ous­ly reduces reli­gious teach­ings to genre thrills (the 20th century’s chief nar­ra­tive mode for con­vey­ing the super­nat­ur­al), while ele­vat­ing Michael as a mod­ern-day embod­i­ment of the Archangel Michael and of Jesus too.

It’s all at once dead­ly seri­ous and utter­ly sil­ly – and while the end­ing of the the­atri­cal cut, with its cheesy effects, is on the kitsch side, an ear­li­er director’s cut (includ­ed as an extra on this disc) is more abstract, impres­sion­is­tic and earnest. Per­haps the truth lies some­where in between these two poles. After all, one priest’s pro­sa­ic strug­gle nei­ther to break his vows nor to exploit sex­u­al­ly a young ward is another’s epic, eter­nal bat­tle between good and evil – and The Unholy tells it both ways…

The Unholy is released on Blu-ray by Lion­s­gate on 25 February.

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