Fear No Evil, 1981
A priest kills a man he believes to be Lucifer, and as he dies the man laughs that he will return. Decades later, a couple have a child named Andrew (Stefan Arngrim), who from the beginning seems to be accompanied by strange events. When Andrew is a senior in high school, the strange and violent events escalate. One of Andrew’s classmates, Julie (Kathleen McAllen) begins having odd visions and makes her way to Margaret (Elizabeth Hoffman), who tells her that Julie is the embodiment of the archangel Gabriel and that Margaret herself is the embodiment of Mikhail. Together, the two women must stop Andrew before he brings large-scale destruction to their town.
Mostly the good kind of weird, this is a unique horror film that benefits from some surprisingly good character work.
There’s a famous (or maybe just famous among people who appreciate absurd snippets of horror movies?) sequence from this film in which a teen boy is hit so hard with a dodgeball during gym class that he’s thrown into the bleachers, blood spurting from his mouth, and the gym teacher falls to his knees and goes “OH GOD NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”. Okay, so based on that alone, I’d always thought that the film would be kind of grungy and dumb.
But this movie isn’t dumb, or at least it mostly isn’t dumb. Instead it’s just a very odd film with a lot of quirks that make it stand out among similar films.
Something that I really liked in this film was the portrayal of Andrew. I honestly can’t say if it’s because of the way that Arngrim chose to perform the character, or if it was written that way, but Andrew often seems confused by what is happening to him. Is it just an act? Maybe? It raises the question as to whether Andrew is a person somewhere in there, or if he’s pure evil.
We get several sequences where we see mundane, or even negative experiences in Andrew’s life. Andrew is a high achiever, academically, which doesn’t exactly endear him to his peers. Andrew is very reserved and socially isolated. But in one scene, a school counselor informs Andrew that he’s been accepted into several ivy league schools, but he can only react with a sort of defeated indifference. It’s like he knows he doesn’t really have a future, and it’s sad even though you know that evil is afoot.
But where this really gets interesting is when Andrew’s powers begin to kick in. In a stand-out sequence, Andrew is being bullied by a group of classmates, led by the repulsive Tony (Daniel Eden). (For reference, Tony is the kind of guy who backhands his girlfriend when he thinks she sat in his car without asking him). As Tony tauntingly sexually harasses Andrew, he’s suddenly overcome with some strange compulsion and ends up kissing Andrew. It seems to take both teens by surprise, and neither of them can break away from one another as their shocked peers watch on. Plenty of teen horror movies make use of shower sequences, usually for more untoward purposes. But this scene, to me, really excels in a queasy intersection between actual horror and the sort of social horror of a shared locker room. If Andrew wasn’t separate already, sharing a gay kiss in front of a bunch of teenage boys really seals the deal. When Andrew uses his powers---if he’s even choosing to use them---it’s followed by what looks like a seizure. Despite knowing that Andrew is, you know, Satan, I found him to be a sympathetic character because of all the things he has going against him and that lingering doubt about how much he’s aware of what’s happening to him.
I also found Julie to be a really interesting character. At first, she’s just the girl that Andrew has a crush on. But at one point Andrew’s powers end up impacting Julie in a very personal way, and this sets off her own journey. Julie finds herself drawn, against her will, to Andrew. She has disturbing but sensual dreams about him, and struggles to understand what’s going on inside of her own head. When Julie connects with Margaret, it totally reshapes her understanding of the world and her role in it. Without getting into spoiler territory, the film takes Julie to places pretty far above what typically ends up being the role of the “final girl.” (Also, there’s nowhere else to put this comment, so I’ll also praise the film for the equity it shows in nudity, something that helps make Julie feel like a more real character because it makes it so that Julie is clearly not just there as eye candy or a lust object for the audience).
There are also some really nice little touches here and there. The poisoned relationship between Andrew’s parents---a side effect of his presence in their lives---is tragic, represented in shorthand by a montage showing their home becoming dilapidated over the years and moments of domestic strife and violence. But there’s a great little scene where Andrew’s father (Barry Cooper), who is the local mailman, talks with Margaret. She comforts him, not totally understanding that the cause of his anguish is the very evil she is dedicated to fighting.
Where the film gets a little iffy is in the last act, as Andrew/Lucifer tries to make good on his promise to bring down havoc and destruction. Don’t get me wrong: there are some truly inspired moments of madness, such as a memorable incident during a religious play. But part of what happens at the end involves zombies, and that’s where I started to think that maybe the person who wrote this film just didn’t know how to end it. The zombie stuff thankfully passes, and the very end of the film is actually very good and strange. But it’s an unfortunate time for the energy of the movie to take such a weird dip in quality and originality.
I also struggled a bit with just how queer-coded Andrew/Lucifer is. If you consider the first half of the film, where we mainly see Andrew as a high school student, it feels more like he’s not “manly” but his interest in Julie is clearly romantic. So the read is more of someone who is quieter and that’s interpreted as being gay/feminine by his male classmates. But in the second half, well, let’s just say that Lucifer wears an absolutely fabulous cape. There’s a part toward the end where Andrew confronts one of his high school tormentors, and the threat he presents is clearly in part sexual. The campy gay villain is a pretty tired trope. Andrew is, as I wrote above, very humanized in the film. So this is an aspect of the film I need to think on a bit more. The problem is that not only does this portrayal come off as possibly homophobic (not helped by a certain strain of religious rhetoric that tells queer people that they have the devil inside them), it’s also several shades of lazy (along with the zombies). And in a film that’s been nuanced and innovative, those qualities are not welcome in the home stretch.
I wish that the last act was stronger. But honestly, I could see this becoming a frequently rewatched low-key favorite.
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