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| Courtesy of MGM |
In 1977 with an adaptation of The Entity author Frank
De Felitta’s novel Audrey Rose, Wise’s film capitalized on such recently
successful genre fare as The Omen, Don’t Look Now, The
Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby while siphoning out the nastier venoms
of those works. The result is one of the
late 1970s more serious minded and less flashy entries in the supernatural
child thriller subgenre, a film that takes the subject seriously without
leaning into exploitation while channeling powerful performances from all the
actors. It also establishes Frank De
Felitta who adapted and co-produced the film as perhaps the most narrative
voice in horror fiction since William Peter Blatty.
Bill (John Beck) and Janice Templeton (Marsha Mason) live a
quiet, happy life with their 11-year-old daughter Ivy (Susan Swift) when they
begin noticing a strange, bearded man in a raincoat seems to be following
them. After police calls fail to deal
with the stalking, the eventually reaches out to them formally introducing himself
as Elliot Hoover (Anthony Hopkins). Agreeing to sit and talk over dinner with the man, Hoover explains he is
a widower who lost his wife and young daughter Audrey Rose in a car accident. Moreover, he further claims their daughter
Ivy is in fact the reincarnation of Audrey Rose and that she was born only
minutes after Audrey’s passing. Not long
thereafter, Ivy begins experiencing paralyzing night terrors seeming to stem
from Audrey’s final moments and breaks into hysterical fits that can only be
calmed by Hoover’s intervention as “Audrey’s father”.
Less of a film about demonic possession than examining the
notion of what happens to the soul when it leaves a person’s body, stoking
existential horror fears of your child perhaps not really being your own, Audrey
Rose is a handsomely rendered answer to the heavier more extreme genre fare
that preceded it. While a lower budgeted
piece for the usually grandiose filmmaker (Wise followed this with Star Trek:
The Motion Picture), it nevertheless represents a healthy antidote to the
films that informed it and a quieter, more cerebral return to the genre he mastered
two times before.
Much of the strength
comes from how De Felitta’s story takes place in the present modern day setting
and asks viewers to submit to an absurd idea in a plausible realistic arena. Though Felitta himself would invariably go
down the more extreme horror path with The Entity, his ability to pit
skepticism against superstition in both stories along with his obsession with
the afterlife makes him a bit of a proto-Bruce Joel Rubin screenwriter equally
transfixed by death.
Shot beautifully by frequent comedy (and sometimes thriller)
cinematographer Victor J. Kemper, the eye behind such fare as Eyes of Laura
Mars to Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, the look of Audrey Rose is
very classy. One particularly striking image
which was used in some poster and VHS cover releases involves a recurring vista
of Ivy in one of her fits inexplicably burning her hands on a cold wet window,
screaming and crying out as the camera sits outside the window watching the
raindrops trickle down. It’s a terrifying,
claustrophobic image that manages to instill many of the same fears as Owen Roizman’s
dynamic cinematography on The Exorcist.
Then there’s the score by renowned and accomplished composer
Michael Small, the same man who scored Klute, The Parallax View and
Marathon Man, which instills fear and unease in the viewer as we
experience with these parents the terror of a stranger coming in to claim your
child as his own as your child seems to go mad.
Primarily orchestral, the score echoes what would or would not become
the style of Howard Shore in David Cronenberg’s work, spilling out all kinds of
notes of calm before building up to a storm of sound.
Let it be said all four of the main players in this
psychological thriller touching on notions of reincarnation and possession give
top tier performances in a genre that still doesn’t get enough respect from the
Academy. Marsha Mason makes the mother
of this well-to-do family increasingly frightened by the mysterious man
encroaching upon her world followed by the strange changes happening within her
daughter while also wrestling with her skeptical husband played equally
brilliantly by John Beck whose own anger towards the situation beyond his
control breaks into rages. Anthony Hopkins,
many the film’s finest actor, does a fantastic job of making the strange Elliot
Hoover seem eccentric if not a little crazy while still channeling powerful
emotions of his own onscreen. Last but
not least is newcomer Susan Swift who never acted before but bites and claws
with all her might at this role, rivaling the great Linda Blair even.
Despite all of the above, Audrey Rose kind of came
and went at the box office, amassing a meager $2 million beneath its production
budget. Critics who generally respected
Wise’s oeuvre came down on the movie citing it as yet another The Exorcist rip-off
while complaining how the picture seems to shift gears into a quasi-courtroom
drama for a brief time including but not limited to hypnosis at one point.
Still in the years since the film has enjoyed
renewed cult interest as the great director’s final horror film in his
otherwise illustrious career. After recent
critical reappraisal of Felitta’s The Entity followed by Wise’s director’s
cut of Star Trek: The Motion Picture finally getting a due proper
release, its time modern viewers came back and reassessed this passionately
acted psychological horror gem that dares to ask existential questions about
the possibilities of life before or after this one.
--Andrew Kotwicki
