by Brendan Foley
Arrow Heads
Arrow Video, a subsidiary of Arrow Films, humbly describe themselves as merely a “Distributor of classic, world, cult and horror cinema on DVD & Blu-ray.” But we film geeks know them as the Britain-based bastion of the brutal and bizarre, boasting gorgeous Blu-ray releases with high quality artwork and packaging and bursting with extras (often their own productions). Their collector-friendly releases had traditionally not been available in the U.S., but now Arrow has come across the pond and this column is devoted to discussing their weird and wonderful output.
A deeply disturbed (and disturbing) horror film, The Witch Who Came from the Sea, now available through Arrow Video, may have been advertised as a sexed up slasher/monster flick, but in actual content the film is a deeply sad story of the lonely psychological spiral of a woman struggling with traumatic memories of her sexual abuse as a child.
The Witch Who Came from the Sea may be an American film, but its reputation for shock came from across the pond. Named as one of the “video nasties” by British censors (a list that includes the like of the original Evil Dead), The Witch still managed to develop a cult following from the likes of noted critic Mark Kermode, fascinated as they were by the film’s frank and uncompromising depiction of the physical and psychological toll of rape.
The posters promise a big-titted monster going on a hack-and-slash rampage, but Molly (Millie Perkins, better known as Anne Frank from George Stevens’ The Diary of Anne Frank) is no monster. The movie opens with Molly spending a pleasant afternoon at the beach with her nephews. Down the beach, big beefy dudes are working out, with only slim mankinis for cover. As Molly watches the bulging muscles, her mind intercuts these arousing images with hallucinations of the men bloodied and mutilated.
Sex and violence are inextricable for poor Molly, and the movie makes no secret as to why. While she insists to anyone who will listen that her father was a wonderful, God-fearing man, Matt Cimber (Jayne Mansfield’s ex-husband!) reveals in very short order that Molly’s father raped her, frequently, and decades after his death the buried memories are tearing Molly apart.
Cimber tries to play with reality, to mixed results. Sequences play out with what appears to be dream logic only to be revealed to be true, but the budget and filmmaking simply is not there to pull off the kind of fluid reality feel that you need to keep the audience off-foot. The movie was shot by Dean Goddamn Cundey, a legendary cinematographer who collaborated with John Carpenter, Robert Zemeckis, and Steven Spielberg on some of their finest work (this motherfucker shot The Thing, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, AND Jurassic Park. Only two years after The Witch, he would be the man behind the camera for Carpenter’s medium-redefining Halloween). Cundey and Cimber work to make every frame feel intentionally ‘off’, but the results vary between off-putting or aggravating.
And as Molly’s mind breaks and the body count rises, Cimber at times seems at a loss as to how to turn her breakdown into drama, with lots of the aimless meandering that genre fans will find familiar in B-movies. These pictures tend to have lots and lots of down time between the legendary fits of poster-depicted insanity, and The Witch Who Came from the Sea is no exception.
But if the filmmaking is clumsy (I honestly thought that this had to be a cheapie Italian film and was shocked to learn it was an American production), the film still generates a shocking amount of shock. Rape and sexual violence remain taboo topics that storytellers, even great ones, struggle to depict. Great shows like Game of Thrones still get (deservedly) bashed for their handling of the subject, while exploitative fuck-nuggets like the people who make SVU or Criminal Minds have turned rape culture into an inexhaustible entertainment fodder. A woman’s sexuality is still the thing that censors hate most, and conversations about rape continue to skew towards victim blaming or slut-shaming. It’s a cultural-wide breakdown, and we’re not any closer to getting it right.
Which makes The Witch Who Came from the Sea all the more upsetting and gives the film power beyond its cheap production values and stilted line readings. Cimber puts you square in Molly’s head, forcing you to feel her hurt, her confusion, her doomed struggle to bring herself back to sense. The film drives right into the heart of the pain that drags Molly down, demanding that you see her as the wronged and broken person instead of the sexed-up beast that the poster promised.
There are other things to discuss, including the way the film attempts to tie Molly’s downfall with society’s longstanding treatment of women and their sexuality (hence the discussions of mermaids and other myths and legends) but those are essays for another day. For now, Arrow has done film a great service by rescuing this oddity from obscurity and giving adventurous film fans the opportunity to sit down with a baffling, infuriating little work of art.
The Witch Who Came In From The Sea is now available from Arrow Video as part of the American Horror Project box set.
Get it at Amazon:
American Horror Project [Blu-ray]