I wasn’t around at the time but by all accounts, 1976 was a pretty weird year to live through, culturally. The highest-selling album was ‘Frampton Comes Alive.’ The second highest-grossing movie was the Barbara Streisand / Kris Kristofferson ‘A Star is Born.’ The book Trinity by Leon Uris, which was about Irish history leading up to The Troubles and I’m sure has aged gracefully, topped the bestseller list. Ford vs. Carter. The death of Mao Zedong. There was an Olympics in there. There was plenty going on but none of it seems to have exactly lingered in the public consciousness. The world did get five new episodes of ‘Columbo,’ though.
It was also far enough past the sixties that the hangover had well and truly settled in. Whatever fuzzy energy had built up to explode in 1969 had dissipated into the aether and the world seemed to have embraced its burnt-orange and avocado colored fate. The non-fiction bestseller list was full of titles like Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life, the tv schedule was littered with nostalgia like ‘Happy Days’ and ‘Laverne and Shirley,’ Tom Wolfe coined the term “The ‘Me’ Decade” to describe the inward turn culture seemed to have taken. After what had seemed like a decade of working towards something important the 70’s curdled into a slow inward collapse as people shrank inside themselves, turning insular in their search for meaning.
It wasn’t all like that, of course. I mentioned ‘A Star is Born’ above as the second-highest grossing movie of the year because the actual highest-grossing was ‘Rocky,’ and any year that can turn that out isn’t completely bad. Bowie put out ‘Station to Station,’ Agatha Christie hit the bestseller list twice, there was plenty of culture there for people who wanted it, but the sad, almost pleading quasi-horror at the center of 1976’s ‘Dark August’ is so palpably a product of its time that I’d like to think I’d have pegged the year it was released just by watching it cold.
Directed by Martin Goldman, who also co-wrote the script with its two stars J.J. Barry and Caroline Shelyne, ‘Dark August’ was made on a palpably shoestring budget in Stowe, Vermont, which today claims to be “the ski capital of the East” but at the time seems to have been a sleepy little tourist town where a former ad-agency executive turned filmmaker could own a vacation cabin and work out some personal issues through making a film.
Although he has a pretty thin filmography Martin
Goldman’s background in the industry is pretty interesting. Like the main character of this movie, named Sal
Devito and played by J.J. Barry, Goldman spent time in the New York advertising
world working on and designing national advertising campaigns before stepping
up to directing commercials and eventually feature films. He was the director of a 1972 Paramount
Productions film starring Fred Williamson, the name of which you get to look up
yourself. He then went independent for
this movie, which only had a small distribution almost entirely in the South
for reasons that remain unclear. Basically
lost to obscurity for years, it has become relatively more available due to its
2019 2K remaster and reissue as part of the ‘American Horror Project Vol. 2’
box set. It’s here where I have to admit
that I don’t have access to this resissue or its numerous features, which includes
a director’s commentary, so understand that almost everything I say in regard
to this movie is missing any direct input from the filmmakers, which is
available. Like so many good things it
also exists to be enjoyed on Tubi, as well as Shudder at the time of writing.
Metaphorically accurate, I guess.
Two of the main actors are worth noting as well. J.J. Barry was a comedic character actor who popped up as a somewhat featured player on ‘Rowen & Martin’s Laugh-In,’ had some guest spots on ‘Barney Miller,’ ‘The Love Boat,’ and even led a short-run sitcom in 1972’s ‘The Corner Bar.’ There’s also Kim Hunter, playing a psychic named Adrianna Putnam, who takes over the last third of the movie. Hunter won an Academy Award as Stella opposite Marlon Brando in 1951’s ‘A Streetcar Named Desire.’ By this point in her career she’d settled into steady television work and reportedly took the part because of her own interest in paranormal matters. Both of these actors and in fact most of the cast are very good in this movie. There are a lot of things to criticize here but the acting isn’t one of them.
It’s odd to say about an ostensible horror movie but the supernatural and scary parts of the movie are the least important and least interesting. The story is essentially ‘Pumpkinhead’ minus the special effects and tension. The premise is extremely straightforward: before the events of the movie our main character killed a young girl in a car accident. As it opens her grandfather casts a curse on him seeking revenge. After a series of escalating events our protagonist Sal seeks out the help of a local witch. The cleansing ceremony is interrupted by the grandfather who kills the psychic and is then killed by the demon he’d summoned. The movie ends shortly thereafter on a very ambiguous note.
This is basically all that actually happens in the movie. At eight-six minutes it’s not a very long film. There are a few scenes of near action: there’s a panic attack at a store, a character accidently saws into their own leg, Sal chases a robed figure through the woods, a character is attacked by the grandfather while she’s investigating his house, but except for these and some very brief violence at the séance the movie is deliberately slow and formal. It’s much more interested in the situation Sal finds himself in and how he reacts to what’s happening in his life than any of the mechanics of the plot. Nothing definitively paranormal actually happens in this movie, there’s absolutely nothing that couldn’t technically exist in a straightforward drama, although the supernatural intent is clear, just a victim of budget.
Let’s address the things that almost work. The most obvious is the directing and cinematography, which most of the time is pretty darn good. The movie starts with an opening shot of a house with the title card, then cuts to a slow pan over various bits and pieces of string, fabric, candles, and assorted nick-nacks as the grandfather character slowly speaks a rather garbled curse over a blippy bloopy electronic soundtrack underscored by insistent jazz drums. All we see are closeups of matches, fingers, his mouth speaking, and then his hands as he caresses what seems to be a ball of wax. While overlong it does well in establishing a suitably creepy tone. This is followed by more precise shots as a jeep arrives at a house, then we watch as Jackie, Sal’s girlfriend, exits the jeep and goes inside and starts making breakfast while Sal finishes a shower. It’s important to note that the camera motions are very slow and controlled throughout, the framing deliberate. It establishes a visual motif that continues throughout the movie of shots starting on a frame empty of actors, establishing a space, then the actors will either move into that space or the camera will move to find the actors. Lots of wide, still shots as action happens in the distance or as actors move from one side of the frame to the other. It’s hardly action-packed but it does a very good job of grounding us in a sense of place throughout.
This stands in pretty sharp contrast to any time the
camera has to convey movement from place to place or any sense that time has
passed. If it’s a static scene with
simple blocking and a couple of central characters the movement is fluid and
deliberate, picking careful compositions and establishing meaning through
movement. The second someone has to pick
up a camera everything goes wobbly and it starts crashing from edit to edit,
losing any sense of geography or internal consistency. The section where Sal wanders through the
woods is completely incomprehensible. There’s
a montage of the two main characters in bed that attempts to convey that time
is passing but comes off more as a parody of artsy editing. Scenes tend to start in the middle with
almost no establishing shots so as the plot continues we get very little sense
of how each scene relates to the ones before.
Sometimes we get conversational cues as to how much time has passed but
most of the time we don’t. If we’re
lucky we’ll get a moody shot of a sunset to indicate that a day is ending. 
About as horrific as it gets.
Rural Vermont seems like a pretty fascinating place to shoot in but the movie only partly takes advantage of it. Although a few scenes do take place in the forest it’s palpable how uncomfortable the filmmaking becomes when it’s out of doors. The locations are almost entirely interiors of obviously real places and there’s an immense fascination to be found in the details of the time period. There’s a scene set in the town general store that I could spend all day studying frames of. From the bike hanging in the window to the haphazard spread of shelves holding brands that were obviously not cleared by legal, tourists checking out t-shirts in the background interspersed with apparent locals just there for staples, it’s this raw slice of 1976 commerce that seems endlessly interesting. When they can park the camera in the middle of a field and focus on a car slowly winding its way down a dirt road you get some sense of the countryside, but that’s about it.
Hand-in-hand with the acting I’ll also give some limited praise to the dialogue and scene construction. I suspect that the writing credits spread between the director and the two leads reflects the fact that a lot of the script was workshopped during production. Again, this is a question to which the answer exists but that I don’t have access to, so be aware I could be completely wrong, this is just how it seems to me. There’s a lot of 1970’s naturalistic acting here and most of the time it works. We’re given very little flat exposition, characters and situations are simply referred to and the movie expects us to be able to follow along and pick up the details as we go, and given the limited setting and premise this isn’t difficult at all. The contours of the characters’ lives, their relations to each other, and what the ongoing conflicts are essentially make up the first half of the movie, after which the curse plot takes over. The main focus is on Sal and he’s an interesting enough character, sympathetic if also selfish and short-tempered. It’s not that difficult to spend just under an hour and a half with him.
The majority of the problems with the movie involve the
underlying conceit, that this is a supernatural tale of revenge. The grandfather character, who opens the
movie with his curse and whose actions drive everything, is such a tertiary
character that he makes little to no impression on the narrative. To a certain extent this seems by design, and
his inclusion in the margins of scenes is often effective. He’ll be glimpsed through windows, or in the
backgrounds of shots, he’s referred to by the other characters in asides, it’s
not like his presence isn’t felt, but about halfway through the movie he’s
directly confronted by our main character and basically doesn’t react. It’s at this point that you’d expect to hear
his side, his justification for enacting his revenge for the death of his
granddaughter, but aside from some mumbled dialogue he’s completely without
characterization and you realize that he’s basically just a plot point,
something for Sal to struggle against.
Since he’s basically absent as a source of menace and there’s nothing to
replace him as an active threat there’s no real sense of danger, just a kind of
unsatisfying malaise to everything that dovetails well with the emotions of our
characters but doesn’t exactly scream fright fest. The focus shifts from the curse we witnessed
in the opening minutes to how this is just one more thing causing problems for
Sal.
Just hangin' out, waiting on that curse.
So if the horror movie isn’t really a horror movie, what kind of movie is it? To me the most indicative moment happens just under eleven minutes in. After that opening where we establish the curse and meet the characters there’s some business with a phone call from Sal’s boss at the ad agency in New York and a brief conversation establishing that he has a friend named Theo and that Sal’s girlfriend Jackie runs an art gallery. The two of them decide to go for a drive. There’s a very brief interlude where Sal hears their dog whining, he looks around and briefly sees a hooded figured watching him from the woods that disappears between edits, he looks distressed, then we’re in the art gallery and they’re trading conversational snippets about the paintings there. Jackie makes a joke that causes Sal to take a beat then pull her close. He says the following monologue which, as I said, pretty much sums up the entire thing.
“Baby, when I was a kid, my father used to take us for drives in the country. To him Jackson Heights was the country. When we used to take these drives I always used to image a great, white horse running alongside the car. This great stallion with its mane flowing would follow us wherever we went. Whether it’s in tunnels, over bridges, on highways, that great, white horse would be there. You know what? You’re the only other person I know in the world that owns one.”
Later on a white horse in a field is used as a scene transition, and later still it’s shown running from a fire Sal sets. It’s that kind of movie.
This is not a difficult metaphor to decipher, so let’s just dive in. This is, at base, a story about a guy going through a mid-life crisis as he tries desperately to recapture the artistic inspiration he felt as a child but apparently neglected up to this point in his life. The backstory that gradually trickles out during the narrative is that about a year before the movie starts Sal left his wife and kids, moved from New York City to rural Vermont, started living with Jackie, and is desperately trying to start his life over. He’s shown to be an artist, seated at a drawing board (he’s drawing a horse instead of working on the ad copy covering the rest of the surface, this movie isn’t trying to hide what it’s doing), his girlfriend runs an art gallery, his best friend used to be a lawyer but quit to go into pottery, the best friend’s girlfriend is into tarot and witchcraft, this is all very much part and parcel of the ‘find yourself’ mantra that ran desperately through so much of the 1970’s.
The
movie gets very direct about it. In one
scene his wife calls him from New York and they argue. We only hear his side of the conversation,
during which he angrily insists he in fact does know what his responsibilities
are, he does care about her and the kids, but that kind of life just isn’t in
him, that kind of station-wagon existence, this is just something he has to do
because he’s almost forty and this is the last shot he has. Immediately after this he sees the hooded
figure again and chases it into the woods to yell at it, asking what it
wants. Again, movie’s pretty open in
what it’s doing.
Horse.
The dialogue explicitly establishes Sal as being 39 years old, about to turn 40, and several times characters refer to him as someone who never quite grew up. There’s a scene where Sal and Jackie have a conversation that starts with the line “How can you accept someone without first judging them?” and doesn’t improve much from there. In a couple of scenes it’s established that Sal is building himself a small studio and is advised to burn it down to help drive away the demon. Not a lot may happen in this movie but what does happen is very deliberate and usually very obvious.
Therefore whether or not this movie succeeds for you really comes down to how invested you are in the inner life and struggles of one Sal Devito, and he’s not a completely uninteresting character. He’s charming enough, he’s shown to be a fairly talented artist, he seems to genuinely love and appreciate Jackie, he has some good friends, the accident that killed the little girl really wasn’t his fault and for which he does seems sorry about, this is not a bad person we’re talking about here.
But. And it’s a pretty big but. He is shown to be incredibly selfish in a way that the movie doesn’t quite seem to recognize. The first and largest strike against him is that he ran out on his family. When he argues with his wife on the phone we’re only shown his side of the conversation, so we only get his arguments. I don’t think any of the arguments he makes are worth anything but I’m not sure the movie agrees. His side consists almost entirely of pointing out that he wasn’t happy, wasn’t feeling fulfilled, insists he’s fully aware of his responsibilities while perched in a cabin miles away from his children, puts the decision on whether or not to get a divorce entirely on her, I find none of this convincing but the way the scene is shot and the way Sal is portrayed I get the impression that we’re supposed to be on his side.
Then
there’s the early scene between Sal and his friend Theo which seems like a
throwaway exposition scene at the time but in retrospect pretty much lays out
the conflict of the movie. Sal complains
to Theo about a series of unspecified ‘attacks’ he’s been having since being cleared
over the accident. He suspects the
grandfather is somehow behind it, which would seem to lead to an exploration of
the curse and the spookiness going on but instead this gets dropped for about
the next forty-five minutes. He
complains that the grandfather is always around, looking at him, and what’s he
supposed to do, leave town? He refuses,
he’s paid too many dues to get there.
His friend rather correctly points out that the grandfather is not just
going to get over his granddaughter being killed, and the scene kind of peters
out from there. What’s basically
established is that Sal is resentful that the grandfather is always around as a
reminder of his mistakes and a source of guilt.
What’s odd is that the movie doesn’t seem at all interested in interrogating
this point. As already established the
grandfather isn’t really a character.
There’s an entire scene that builds up to an explosive confrontation
between the two of them that gathers a crowd and eventually the attention of
the sheriff, but the grandfather doesn’t react and simply wanders away
afterwards. The movie really only has
room to examine Sal’s side, and considering we open with a demon-summoning
ritual I don’t really think the movie assumes we’re that sympathetic to the
grandfather. 
This scene is so ... goddamn ... long.
Again, there’s an entire director’s commentary that might say the opposite, that we’re supposed to feel over the course of the movie that Sal has in some way earned this punishment, that the curse is directly about the death of the little girl but more generally a result of his selfishness. Maybe the grandfather is such a side character because the curse is just one more problem that Sal has managed to bring on himself. This is a very plausible interpretation of events and all I can say against it is that over the course of the movie I felt like it was taking Sal’s side. Maybe a second viewing would change my mind.
All of this is why I’m making the pretty obvious assumption that what this movie is really about is the director taking stock of his own life. The parallels between the main character’s background and his own are striking, using artistic expression as a justification for how he’s living his life and as a defense against accusations of selfishness follows pretty directly from there. Mix in some input by the two main actors (who began dating during and eventually married after the production) and it’s pretty clear that the interest of the filmmakers was not on the spooky stuff.
Which is why the decision to structure the entire last half hour of the movie around an exorcism slash séance kind of ruins the entire thing. At around the hour mark we’re introduced to Kim Hunter’s character, Adriana Putnam. Her name is mentioned around forty minutes in by someone, she’s established as a witch, and once Sal has deteriorated to the point where he’s chasing vague figures into the woods he finally agrees to go see her. She’s introduced licking the forehead of a toddler for esoteric spooky reasons, which is certainly a choice. Hunter plays her as very grounded and sincere, which stands in stark contrast to the nonsense she immediately starts spouting. According to her not only are there five forces in nature, earth, water, air, fire, and a lifeforce, they come together to form seven different levels, the first of which is the lower astral plane, and in that plane someone who knows how can let loose the forces of evil. These forces can upset the balance and have to be balanced out. I only spend time detailing this because the movie certainly does, and to no clear end. A shockingly high amount of these last thirty minutes is spent on Hunter getting into the weeds on things that don’t really matter. The actual ceremony itself is a solid eleven minutes long before it’s interrupted with a shotgun blast to Kim Hunter’s back.
Then there’s the ending, which not only doesn’t wrap up the matter of the demon or the curse but also doesn’t really address what the rest of the movie is about: Sal’s midlife crisis. Intermittently during the movie we’ve seen Sal and Jackie interact with their dog. It’s whined at the robed figure tormenting Sal a couple of times, Jackie fed it some leftovers, it’s been in the background of some scenes, but it’s never been given any particular emphasis. What has been more emphasized is Sal’s ownership of a rifle, which he will occasionally have in hand during insert shots of him pacing around the cabin, shirtless. After the séance, after the psychic has been shot and the grandfather has apparently been either killed or just taken by the robed figure he summoned, it’s left very unclear, Sal is coming home from … somewhere and again sees the robed figure watching him from the woods. He takes his dog and gun and goes out into the forest after it.
Because
we’re outside and the camera is moving it once again becomes very hard to understand
what’s going on. Best I can tell the dog
begins to follow something of a trail, begins to whine in the same way it’s
been whining before upon spotting the robed figure, Sal looks around but can’t
see anything, sees a very unclear set of markings in the mud that seem very
artificial but don’t mean anything obvious no matter how long the camera shot
lingers on it, and then the dog begins to growl and bark and attacks Sal. After a rolling series of edits that convey
the general sense that the dog wasn’t really trained to attack for the camera Sal
is forced to shoot his dog. The final moments
of the movie are the dog dying, Sal falling to his knees beside it, him placing
a comforting hand on it as it dies, then a still frame of his sad face as the
credits roll. And that’s it.
The sign of evil, I guess?
If you wanted to be generous you could say that the ambiguity of the ending is appropriate as the movie doesn’t seem to want to answer any of the questions it’s been raising. If the real heart of the movie is Sal’s guilt over his own selfishness, then the actual threat wasn’t the demon set upon him by the grandfather but the internal self-doubt that’s causing his stress and panic attacks. The dog is another part of his life that’s turning on him and in having to put it down it’s another consequence of how he’s chosen to live. As an alternative I would lean much more towards the interpretation that the filmmakers didn’t have any idea how to wrap anything up and simply ended with a half-hearted shrug. At the end of the film Sal is still miserable, his dog is now dead, the little girl he killed is still dead, and about the only positive development is that the old man isn’t going to be glaring at him from across the street anymore.
This isn’t a terrible movie but it also isn’t a very successful one. The direction was interesting, the acting was good, the story was barely existent, and the ending was deeply unsatisfying. Being unsatisfying on purpose is still unsatisfying. While its premise is that of a horror movie it never even attempts to really be one. Everything about the curse could have been excised and you’d basically have the same movie. You wouldn’t have the exorcism or the psychic being shot, but considering the movie ends almost directly after that scene while never showing any kind of consequences it doesn’t seem like that big a loss. This is a movie about a guy about to hit forty and feeling guilty about his choices in life and then the movie ends without ever giving him any kind of breakthrough or catharsis. It simply establishes that he’s in a bad place, shows how it’s bad, then ends with him still in that place with no self-examination having taken place at any point. It’s possible that the director made this movie to work out those emotions and by the end of production was still ambivalent and without answers. That doesn’t help me as a viewer. Martin Goldman wouldn’t direct another movie until 1997’s ‘Legend of the Spirit Dog,’ which is a family film about a magical Native American spirit dog that I’m sure has held up just fine, which is a shame as in this he displays some natural aptitude and a surprising amount of authorial intent. It’s a fairly raw portrayal of what 1976 must have felt like and for me at least that’s likely more interesting than any tension these filmmakers could have wrung out of such a standard premise.
