WARLOCK MOON

Directed by William Herbert. United States. 1973.

The film begins with our cutie patootie lead, Jenny, attending a college psychology class. The teacher is talking all about deviant patterns of behavior, including homosexuality, incest, and cannibalism. I’d add watching low-budget 70s horror movies to that list. WARLOCK MOON is a Rorschach test of a movie, veering wildly between folk horror, ghost story, Surrealist shocker, and bargain-basement slasher. The visual style is best described as ‘hazy’, and while soft-focus photography tends to annoy me in most movies, it’s probably the best possible choice for a story like this. It lends a dreamlike air to the proceedings. Fitting, because I still to this day cannot tell how much of this film is rooted in reality.

Dead flowers magically regrow and bloom between scenes. Rooms are empty one minute, and furnished the next. The central location for the narrative, an abandoned relaxation resort, looks more like a rundown mental hospital. Jenny and her beau John go on an off-screen picnic getaway in their bustling college town, then get lost while driving home through what looks like a devastated panhandle. The kindly old woman living at the resort, Ms. Abercrombi, is written in an obviously sinister way, but no one seems to notice. None of these things are mistakes or oversights. The film is full of visual and narrative contradictions, tiny ironies, and not-so-subtle foreshadowing, none of which would feel out of place in an old children’s story by the Brothers Grimm.

After their initial time at the rundown resort with creepy, old Ms. Abercrombi, our couple returns so that John can write a newspaper article about the place. Arriving early, Jenny finds the resort empty. The only person around is a local hunter who tells our lead that no one has lived here in decades. There’s even an urban legend about the place. In 1930 or so, the owner held a swanky banquet. The guest of honor was his newly married daughter. To everyone’s dismay, the bride never showed. They ate and drank, and everyone had a grand night... until they discovered the butchered body of the bride in the kitchen. Her flesh had been used for the main course. No one has seen the cook since. She just disappeared. Jenny leaves to greet John at the gate, but the hunter never makes it out of the resort alive, meeting his maker at the hands of an axe-wielding weirdo.

Later on that night, Jenny sees a ghostly bride and follows her. She stumbles upon the axe murderer and his weird friend carving up the hunter’s body. Jenny narrowly avoids becoming another casualty. John dismisses the whole ordeal as a fever dream. After all, Jenny has been feeling a bit under the weather since lunch.

At dinner that night, Ms Abercombi serves the couple ‘hunter stew’ (eww), and Jenny catches her spiking her glass of wine. Once again, John dismisses her concerns, leaving her alone to be attacked in the middle of the night. The axe-wielding weirdo chops down her door before running off into the darkness. John comforts her, but of course, there’s no damage to the door and no evidence that anyone was in the room with her.

The film quickly escalates into violence. The strange stone circle Jenny found earlier in the film gets explained, and the narrative slips out of damsel-in-distress slasher horror into full-blown cult horror, yet another genre shift in a film laden with genre shifts. The final scene gives us one last shift in tone and representation, this time to an anti-drug message movie. It’s one more explanation for a film that wholeheartedly refuses to be explained.

WARLOCK MOON never once tells us conclusively if Jenny is nuts, high as a kite, schizophrenic, or if the whole film is just a put-on, nothing more than a nonsensical series of scenes with no ‘reality’ in sight. Is this a tone poem or a bit of quasi-surrealism masquerading as a lightweight horror film? Is this magical realism? The nature of the occult isn’t defined here. Is it Satanism? Druidism? Does it even matter? Is it even real in the first place?

I’m tempted to say that WARLOCK MOON would make a fantastic double billing with Michael Findlay’s excellent schlock-mobile, SHRIEK OF THE MUTILATED, a movie all about a bunch of college students trying to find a Yeti (in fucking upstate New York of all places), before morphing into a cannibal cult horror movie in its final act. But while that comparison seems apt on paper, in terms of tone, WARLOCK MOON would be a much better companion to something like LET’S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH or CARNIVAL OF SOULS. Tonally, the three films are similar, dreamlike and unconcerned with strict boundaries between the real and the unreal.

The more I’ve watched WARLOCK MOON over the years, the more it impresses me. Yes, you will need to make many concessions over its running time. The sound is atrocious, and the acting is inconsistent, to say the least. The ironic denouement is hilariously awful, and the cold opening is a textbook example of how not to construct a horror movie set-piece. But goddamn it, there’s something undeniably intoxicating about everything else. It has a nicely textured, almost Gothic tone, and the slow unraveling of the narrative lets you steep in it. It’s dreamy and disconcerting, with something off-putting around every corner. It’s the kind of film I like to watch on lazy days when I want to experience a mood, and leave logic for another time. It’s a great piece of atmospheric 70s horror. Not for the easily frustrated, but what is?