Why The Witch Who Came from the Sea is my favourite Video Nasty

Although released in 1976, Matt Cimber’s The Witch Who Came from The Sea gained wide­spread atten­tion in 1984 when the Direc­tor of Pub­lic Pros­e­cu­tion put it on the ​‘Video Nas­ties’ list, cen­sor­ing and ban­ning it in the UK from the pub­lic. That being said, unlike most of the oth­er films of its ilk that made the list, The Witch Who Came from The Sea has very lit­tle gore in it. While the film does have explic­it nudi­ty, it shrinks into obliv­ion when com­bined with the excru­ci­at­ing­ly hor­ri­fy­ing and real­is­tic themes it delves into.

Fresh from her well-received role as Anne Frank, Mil­lie Perkins plays Mol­ly, a sin­gle woman who ador­ing­ly dotes on her two nephews. She paints a roman­ti­cized mem­o­ry of her sailor father, idol­iz­ing him to be just as noble as the celebri­ties they admire on tele­vi­sion, before ulti­mate­ly dying at sea. Her sis­ter Cathy (Vanes­sa Brown) gen­tly reminds Mol­ly that this is not exact­ly what hap­pened, with the real­i­ty being that their father repeat­ed­ly inflict­ed sex­u­al abuse on her, which we dis­cov­er through sick­en­ing flash­backs and hallucinations.

In what turns out to be a unique way of resolv­ing her frus­tra­tions from her trau­mat­ic past, Mol­ly begins seduc­ing men that soci­ety has deemed hero­ic (Hol­ly­wood stars, sports fig­ures) and hav­ing her way with them before cas­trat­ing and killing them, only to wake up with lit­tle to no rec­ol­lec­tion of what had hap­pened. As we weave through­out Molly’s trag­ic tale, her black­outs begin to feel more real – a self-real­iza­tion of her own men­tal illness.

While some of its ​‘nasty’ con­tem­po­raries such as I Spit on Your Grave had a much more black and white rape-and-revenge approach to exploita­tion hor­ror, The Witch Who Came from The Sea is dis­tinc­tive for sev­er­al rea­sons. If we’re being hon­est, in most cas­es exploita­tion flicks are light on the plot. The gore and nudi­ty are essen­tial to a ​‘nasty’ and usu­al­ly serve the sole pur­pose of tit­il­lat­ing their audi­ence. In the case of The Witch Who Came from The Sea, the film fea­tures not only a Freudi­an lens, but is rid­dled with mytho­log­i­cal sym­bol­ism. Fur­ther, Molly’s har­row­ing past and nur­tur­ing dis­po­si­tion evoke sym­pa­thy and pity – emo­tions that the view­er miss­es out on in reg­u­lar grind­house entries.

Robert Thom’s script also makes tele­vi­sion a cen­tral piece of the film, par­tic­u­lar­ly its manip­u­la­tive pow­er; an incred­i­bly fit­ting theme for the time. Molly’s mur­ders are trig­gered by com­mer­cials and con­ver­sa­tions about celebri­ties, as she’s immersed in the television’s pow­er of ide­al­iz­ing mas­culin­i­ty in soci­ety. This mir­rors her frac­tured mem­o­ries of watch­ing TV as a child to tune out her father’s abuse – result­ing in her roman­ti­cized view of TV’s finest icons. At one point she tells one of her suit­ors, ​“tele­vi­sion makes peo­ple so much kinder, doesn’t it?” Mol­ly open­ly idol­izes these pic­ture-per­fect men after see­ing them on TV, par­al­lel to her ide­al­ized view of her abu­sive father. Once she seduces them and they turn out to be sub­par, she kills them, tak­ing their man­hood in the process.

Thom’s clever ref­er­ences to clas­si­cal mythol­o­gy in the script, along with con­stant metaphor­i­cal ref­er­ences to the sea also add a poet­ic ele­ment sep­a­rat­ing The Witch Who Came from The Sea from its gener­ic ​‘nasty’ brethren. We find out that the sea itself is a euphemistic term Molly’s father used to describe the sex­u­al abuse, telling her they’ll get ​“lost at sea” togeth­er. At anoth­er point, we see Mol­ly gaz­ing intent­ly at a repro­duc­tion of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, with one of her male admir­ers explain­ing the myth to go with it. She learns Venus’ ​“father was a god” who got thrown into the sea and cas­trat­ed, ​“knock­ing up the sea and Venus was the kid.”

It is with this paint­ing that Thom wraps a neat bow on the car­nage that sur­rounds the movie, tying the theme of emas­cu­la­tion that so very evi­dent­ly runs through­out the film. It is also to be not­ed that clas­si­cal mythol­o­gy had very gen­dered mon­sters, many of which were female. Sirens, for exam­ple, were described as birds with the heads of women, lur­ing sailors close to shore before killing them. The overt sex­u­al­i­ty that Mol­ly pos­sess­es is what makes her very desir­able to her suit­ors – yet lethal. This arche­type of the dead­ly female would prove to dom­i­nate hor­ror cin­e­ma in years to come.

The key theme of dis­il­lu­sion­ing one­self between fan­ta­sy and real­i­ty, par­tic­u­lar­ly through media and tele­vi­sion, still rings true to this day, in a time we’d rather be star­ing at a screen than fac­ing our own ugli­est real­i­ties. A trag­ic char­ac­ter study on the after­math of child­hood abuse and an exam­i­na­tion of celebri­ty wor­ship was unfor­tu­nate­ly mar­ket­ed as a hor­ror film and wrong­ful­ly dis­missed. At the end of the day, The Witch Who Came from The Sea is not a cin­e­mat­ic mas­ter­piece by any means, but an intel­li­gent film that deserves more cred­it than the genre it was placed in and worth a watch as a lit­tle-known psy­cho-slash­er gem of the late ​’70s.