The Spell (1977)

Rita Matchett (Susan Myers) is bullied by her peers as well as by her much more mainstream-compatible sister Kris (a very young Helen Hunt) for being mildly overweight as well as because of her general vague “weirdness”. Her family is of little help: father Glenn (James Olson) neither likes her nor seems to give a crap about his less easily relatable daughter’s wellbeing, and her mother Marilyn (Lee Grant) is theoretically trying to help but is in practice at best not actively harmful, and really, for most of the film way nearly as egotistical as her husband, which is saying something.

Things begin to change with the accidental yet strange death of a classmate who was a particularly nasty bully. Rita – to the horror of particularly her dad – seems to start to take pride in being different (oh, the horror!). Soon, other people who give her trouble begin having accidents as well.

Lee Philips’s The Spell is an – appropriately – unholy mixture of formalistically shot family drama with arthouse ambitions, overheated 70s occult horror tropes, and oh so many scenes of absolutely terrible parenting the film seems to believe are at least somewhat okay. Also appearing are a bunch of very funny made up “parapsychological” concepts and terms, and a shock ending that has sod all to do with anything else the movie cares about.

As is painfully obvious, this is one of those movies that attempt to use horror movie tropes to express the fear of clearly freaking rich “middleclass” people of having nonconforming children. The better movies of this type – be they about witches or young female telekinesis practitioners – tend to show the story from the perspective of the maltreated child that eventually explodes, putting an emphasis on the destructive power of the society around them awakening a different kind of destructive power in them as a form of psychic self-defence.

This film at hand is told from Marilyn’s perspective, however, and really doesn’t seem to know what exactly it is trying to do with this, wavering between conservative hand-wringing, compassion with Rita and bouts of apparently believing that being a shit parent is a-okay because of some 70s “finding oneself” bullshit. The film makes little effort actually getting inside of Rita’s mind; which is particularly problematic since there’s very little of interest going on in her parents’ heads, even though Marilyn who is at least trying to do right by her more difficult offspring, is the somewhat more sympathetic of the two.

The film’s largest problem, however, is that Philips really doesn’t seem to know what he wants to do with the metaphorical elements of the narrative, nor how to make this part of the script work in tandem with the film as a horror film. Consequently, the metaphorical level seems to have little resolution and meaning while the horror plot stops and starts and goes nowhere fitting.

From time to time, the heated family discussions suddenly ring true in a more realistic manner, and two of the horror sequences are surprisingly effective. But that’s really all there is to The Spell.