MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #130 The Sentinel 1977

THE SENTINEL 1977

Menagerie of the Damned: Friendships Blossom into Bliss… and the Terror of Hell.

For this piece on The Sentinel, I bent the rules a bit and dove deeper into this richly evocative ’70s horror classic.

When it comes to high-style, high-concept horror, Michael Winner’s The Sentinel (1977) stands as one of the most gloriously Gothic, unapologetically weird entries in the satanic-cinema boom of the late 1970s. Winner, already infamous for the brutal vigilante drama Death Wish 1974, here dials into a different kind of urban anxiety, adapting Jeffrey Konvitz’s 1974 novel into a feverish vision of damnation in New York. In Winner’s hands, the film’s Manhattan is shot by cinematographer Richard C. Kratina (Love Story 1970Hair 1979: as co-director of photography, he helped create the vibrant, kinetic look for Milos Forman’s celebrated musical) with a chilly, sinister glide, through an urban canvas looming, all painting the city as both cradle of activity and crucible for the unknowable. The camera cloaks the notable Brooklyn brownstone in a pall of urban eeriness, using cold, angled light and creeping shadows to transform ordinary spaces into sites of mounting supernatural dread. Through his lens, even the sunlit city feels haunted, every corridor, staircase, and window glows with an uneasy beauty, crafting an atmosphere where menace and melancholy seem to exist side by side in every frame.

At the threshold of every great horror story stands a question not merely of fear, but of meaning, of what darkness reveals when it seeps into the familiar cracks of ordinary life. I look at The Sentinel as a horror film that opens its doors with precisely this kind of haunted, contemplative invitation, conjuring a world where the elegant facades and quiet entranceways of a city brownstone conceal mysteries far older than brick and stone. Here, the boundaries between the mundane and the metaphysical are perilously thin; the resonance of New York is muted just enough for you to hear the anxious throb of something uncanny beneath the surface.

When we enter the film, we step into an atmosphere dense with ambiguity and unease, where each shadow seems charged with odd memories and carries the weight of unspeakable secrets. The brownstone breathes these infernal secrets. What greater terror, after all, than to find the gates to Hell nestled within the heart of the everyday, demanding the kind of solitary vigilance that feels less like heroism than existential punishment?

The Sentinel invites us to ponder the price of such knowledge, how being chosen as a guardian against darkness might not be about elevating the soul, but isolating and hollowing it out, leaving it beyond comparison and perpetually at the boundaries between worlds. The film echoes the panic and disbelief that defined 1970s horror cinema’s descent into urban circles of Hell.

Winner’s urban Gothic does more than deliver shocks, though there are plenty of them; it reflects a deep anxiety about our place in the universe, about the lives lived at the edge of community, sanity, and faith. So it could be said that The Sentinel isn’t only a story of supernatural terror, but a meditation on loneliness, duty, and the unending search for meaning when confronted with the void, and the threat of eternal torment. If every building carries a history, then some—like this one—harbor a kind of ancient sorrow, making every window (just as the blind Carradine’s vigil at the window suggests) the eyes to its soul and flickering light, a silent plea for understanding and redemption in a world forever poised between damnation and deliverance.

Liturgies for the Damned: Gil Mellé’s Sonic Gatekeeping: at the Threshhold of Perdition: the Liminal Soundworld of The Sentinel

What really sets the tone for me is Gil Mellé’s score, which seeps through the film like an unquiet spirit, part spectral lullaby, part urban siren song. Having been a fan of his for as long as I can remember, his music weaves a shimmering lattice of sound that perfectly mirrors the brownstone’s haunted facade and Alison Parker’s unraveling mind. Mellé’s music presses in at the edges. He has a particular affinity for unusual timbres and textures,  sometimes electronically, to produce tones that are at once mournful and ominous. Especially muted trumpets, and mellow French horns, and other horn-like voices, not in lush romantic arrangements, but in eerie, fragmented phrases that hang in the air or stab through the ambience with uncanny clarity.

For The Sentinel, Mellé created a soundscape in which brass instruments play a crucial role in setting the film’s unsettling mood. They echo through the brownstone and the cityscape, almost like fanfares from another world. The result is a mood both sacred and profane—a sonic invocation that swells and recedes like the tide between two worlds.

The cast delivers the sort of glorious ensemble only the ’70s could summon. Cristina Raines plays fashion model Alison Parker, whose performance is a blend of fragile resolve and underlying trauma, threading innocence with a raw, haunted intensity, centering the madness. But it’s the supporting gallery of characters that adds a sense of darkness, decadence, color, and slightly intoxicating; the whole vibe is a claret-soaked treat.

Every haunted house needs more than a single specter—it demands a cast of true oddities, and The Sentinel delivers a menagerie both bizarre and oddly magnetic. At the vortex of this strange apartment building is Burgess Meredith’s gleefully devilish Charles Chazen, the kind of neighbor whose first invitation (“Friendships blossom into bliss, Miss Parker!”) lands somewhere between sincere welcome and seductive threat. Chazen pirouettes through the brownstone like a satanic maître d’, orchestrating parties that are as uncanny as the company, spouting lines with twinkling cheer that somehow chill the blood as much as amuse. His presence infects every room with a puckish menace, turning a simple “blossoming friendship” into a prelude for something far darker.

Chazen is, by turns, ingratiating and menacing, flouncing through scenes in ice-cream suits and throwing parties where quips, cats, and the grotesque collide. Meredith’s Chazen is the brownstone’s gleeful corrupter, frosting dread with a cherry of gallows humor. Meredith is one of the film’s most exquisite threads of macabre humor; it is the source of the sly, devilish current pulsing beneath the growing menace. His offbeat charm and mischievously theatrical style punctuate the unease; he prances and preens through the film as the puckish, sprightly cat-lover who treats Alison like his favorite new plaything.

Charles Chazen, a neighbor whose devilish foppery makes him unforgettable. He’s arch, impish, and deeply unsettling; the kind of old man who throws a cat’s birthday party and seems genuinely delighted by all the mischief that would entail. When he speaks, his voice lilts, like music ringing through the building’s shadows.

But Meredith is not alone in shaping this brownstone’s macabre ecosystem. The Sentinel unleashes an entire carnival of cracked souls, each rendered in a key of high strangeness and giddy discomfort. So, let’s not forget the other great character actors who populate the film’s universe.

Flanking Meredith is Eli Wallach as the pragmatic, skeptical, and world-weary Detective Gatz, a bewildered police detective. Wallach, bristling with New York cop energy as Gatz, teams up with the ever-watchful Christopher Walken’s Lieutenant Rizzo. Walken has a turn as Wallach’s taciturn, observant partner. Their procedural banter and suspicion add noir edges to the supernatural fog, always a few steps behind the building’s sinister design.

Ava Gardner, old Hollywood glamour personified, a magnetic presence, striking green eyes, and a bold, free-spirited style, plays the elusive Miss Logan, the icy, fashionable real estate agent. Gardner’s Miss Logan glides through the film with eerie poise, peddling apartments and vague reassurances in equal measure.

Then there’s a parade of old Hollywood and character-actor royalty—Martin Balsam plays Professor Ruzinsky, the absent-minded classics professor and eccentric Latin translator. And Sylvia Miles. Miles and Beverly D’Angelo’s unsettling duo, Gerde and Sandra, flutter through scenes with a predatory languor. One coos, the other nearly silent, their presence hovering between comic farce and menacing opacity. Their uncomfortable, wordless seduction of Alison leaves us as off-balance as anyone in the apartment.

Arthur Kennedy shuffles in as the weary, pragmatic priest, offering cryptic counsel with the heavy-lidded wisdom of someone who’s seen too much. And then, orbiting at the peripheries, is Jeff Goldblum, still a few years shy of cult stardom, floating through scenes as a fashion photographer, providing dashes of urban absurdity amid the darkness. Michael Sarrazin, Alison’s love interest, plays a character who exudes a slick and slimy charm that masks a calculating, morally ambiguous nature. His suave demeanor conceals a manipulative edge, making him yet another compellingly unsettling figure, and we can’t forget Deborah Raffin as Alison’s loyal confidante.

Set far above the social whirl of Chazen’s gatherings, John Carradine, cinema’s pope of haunted, hollow-eyed solemnity, plays Father Halliran, the blind, spectral Sentinel presides over the brownstone with quiet gravity. Perched high above the city in a darkened upper floor, Carradine doesn’t utter a word; instead, his performance is rendered almost mythic in his silence and abject watchfulness. Sitting motionless amid shafts of sickly light, his hollow cheeks and perpetually searching gaze confer both pity and terror. He’s less a person than a living scarecrow.

Halliran is both Sentinel and sacrificial guardian—the final protection against the infernal tide and the hellish chaos threatening to spill into the world. Seated in perpetual twilight, his blindness is less a limitation than a sign of having seen more than any human should. He’s woven into the narrative as a sorrowful, solitary watcher, embodying the film’s core dread: the price of confronting hell isn’t survival, but transformation into something barely human, locked forever at the threshold.

It’s a role only Carradine could make both mournful and nightmarish, the decaying priest, eyes forever alight with unseen horrors at the very gates of damnation, a living warning as much as it is a benefiction to Alison Parker about the fate that waits for those chosen to stand against darkness. He becomes one of the tragic souls of The Sentinel, without a single showy speech, though scarcely seen, his quiet watchfulness echoing long after the menagerie from Hell disperses.

The source material springs from Jeffrey Konvitz, who spun the original novel, which was a provocative read back then, especially for a horror enthusiast like myself, when the genre was at its most electrifying. He also contributed to the screenplay. Konvitz is probably best known for writing The Sentinel. He wrote other works, like The Guardian—a follow-up to this story, but nothing he created ever captured the horror world’s imagination like this one involving the diabolical brownstone. Winner’s film remains the definitive adaptation, pressing every pulpy button and then some. Konvitz did write the screenplay for Silent Night, Bloody Night 1972.

Konvitz’s mythos of The Sentinel crafts a chilling system of the film’s universe where a seemingly ordinary Brooklyn brownstone conceals the literal gateway to Hell—its tenants are not just quirky eccentrics, but damned souls or figures trapped in a supernatural order that binds the worlds of the living and the dead. At the core of this mythology is the concept of the “Sentinel,” a chosen individual consigned to serve as the lone guardian at the threshold, whose solemn vigil prevents infernal forces from spilling into the world.

Each Sentinel is chosen not by random fate, but through a hauntingly tragic premise: all previous Sentinels, including Alison Parker (Cristina Raines) and Father Halliran (John Carradine), have attempted suicide. Rather than finding an end, those who survive their own deaths are selected by the secret Catholic order that maintains the gateway. Their failed escape from pain and despair results in a lifelong—and afterlife—duty: to stand as Hell’s gatekeeper. This dark ritual binds personal suffering and salvation into a single, sacrificial act. The new Sentinel is burdened with both penance and power, condemned to an eternal watch alone, blind to the living world but bearing witness to the torments of the damned.

From the outset, The Sentinel announces it won’t settle for subtlety. Winner wastes no time cranking up the dread: textural shots and nighttime creaks crescendo to invasions by Chazen’s menagerie. Burgess Meredith’s Charles Chazen insinuates himself into Alison’s new life, and suddenly her reality begins to unravel; all his lines land with both menace and perverse cheer.

The plot twists with the inevitability of a noose: Alison’s romantic partner, uncuous and urbane attorney Michael (Chris Sarandon), tries to shield her from the mounting terror, but is ensnared by both his own secrets and the building’s supernatural agenda. Key scenes throb with surreal intensity, Alison’s vision of her decomposing zombified father, the absurd “party” thrown by Chazen and his ghoulish crew, and her desperate visits to try and meet the reclusive, blind priest who sits in lonely vigil high above the city. The Sentinels’ cold, white eyes, pale and unblinking, convey an otherworldly vacancy, as if they have gazed too long into the abyss, their lifeless stare radiating a chill that feels both mournful and utterly inhuman.

As the web tightens, Alison uncovers the building’s true purpose: it stands as a literal gateway to Hell, with each Sentinel a doomed soul fated to hold back the tide of the damned for eternity. The confrontation on the top floor, where walls literally crawl with a hellish infestation, a grotesque parade of damned souls, and Winner’s penchant for shock reaches its final moment. Climaxing in a crucible of temptation and ritual, Alison faces the ultimate existential horror. By the bitter end, the cycle is complete: the building stands silent, and a new Sentinel, Allison, now Sister Theresa, is in her place, the city outside none the wiser.

Psychologically, The Sentinel weaves together themes of guilt, despair, and the longing for redemption. The connection between suicide attempts and being chosen as a Sentinel underscores a vision of spiritual purgatory: the tenants’ grief, trauma, and isolation turn them into liminal beings who stand between worlds. The role is both punishment and twisted grace—salvation for the soul who can no longer bear earthly suffering, but only if that soul accepts the ultimate sacrifice of their autonomy. The horror is as much internal as external; the threat is not just of demonic invasion, but of being trapped by one’s own unresolved anguish.

This shadowy mission is overseen by a clandestine secret society within the Catholic Church, depicted in the film as robed priests and ecclesiastical authorities who orchestrate the selection and installation of each new Sentinel. They operate with cold determination, aware of the stakes yet emotionally distant from the suffering they oversee. The society’s rituals are riddled with secrecy and symbolism, hinting at ancient traditions that blur the lines between sanctity and damnation, mercy and imprisonment.

Rather than a straightforward battle of good versus evil, the mythology behind The Sentinel invites us to see the truly hellish as personal: the wounds we bear, the lengths we might go to escape them, and the monastic, desolate duties that sometimes result. The secret society is both protector and jailer, its silence complicit, its doctrines leaving the new Sentinel alone in both penance and power. Every watchful figure in that high, cursed window is a survivor of trying to sabotage the life they’ve been given, now forced to confront not only the demonic, but their own shadow forever.

“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

This line, from Canto III of The Divine Comedy, marks the entrance to Hell in Dante’s epic poem and is frequently used in films and literature to evoke a portal to doom or damnation.

The brownstone at 10 Montague Terrace in Brooklyn Heights has become a notable landmark largely due to its prominent role in The Sentinel (1977). Renowned for its striking Neo-Greco architecture and grand, sweeping staircase, the building’s distinctive facade and meticulously preserved interior have cemented its place in horror cinema history, drawing fans eager to see the atmospheric setting.

The film opens in New York City, where beautiful fashion model Alison Parker (Cristina Raines) searches for a new apartment to gain independence and space from her intense boyfriend, lawyer Michael Lerman (Chris Sarandon). With the help of chic realtor Miss Logan (Ava Gardner), Alison selects a sprawling, beautifully situated Brooklyn Heights brownstone. Its rent is suspiciously low, but she’s won over by the charm, despite being told that the only other current resident is a blind priest, Father Halliran (John Carradine), who keeps a vigil in a top-floor window.

From her first night, Alison senses something is off. At night, she is disturbed by unnerving, loud footsteps above her head, even though the apartment above is supposed to be vacant. A chandelier over her bed sways eerily, rhythmically, and spiritedly as if responding to heavy movement. When she reports the noises, the realtor assures her there are no other tenants in the building but the blind priest, but the sounds persist, feeding Alison’s growing sense of unease.

Alison begins meeting the brownstone’s bizarre tenants. She is introduced to Charles Chazen (Meredith), a flamboyant, peculiarly friendly man who seems obsessed with his black-and-white cat Jezebel and his yellow canary Mortimer. He quickly invites her to a strange birthday party for the feline. Among the odd party guests are Gerde and Sandra, a mute and aggressively provocative lesbian couple (Sylvia Miles and Beverly D’Angelo) whose wordless advances leave Alison shocked and unsettled.

The party for Chazin’s beloved cat Jezebel is an impish ruse, a promise of festivity twisted into menace and madness. The invitation arrives with Chazen’s signature flourish: “Friendships blossom into bliss, Miss Parker!” he declares, urging her to join the gathering few could refuse, if only out of curiosity or polite resistance. Alison Parker, barely settled into her new brownstone, is swept into this surreal soiree at the insistence of the irrepressible Charles Chazen, whose puckish, gleaming eyes telegraph both courtly hospitality and impish threat.

Alison is drawn into this surreal celebration featuring dead murderers, a bizarre congregation of damned souls enacting eternal punishment and revelry in one delirious swirl. During the party, the lines between hospitality and threat blur after several subtly off-kilter details. This sequence unfurls like a weird reverie stitched from equal parts Grand Guignol and faded socialite whimsy.

Inside his parlor—cluttered, chintzy, alive with the scent of must and aging velvet—a small crowd assembles around the guest of honor, Jezebel: a black-and-white cat perched wearing a party hat, sits regally at the center of a table dressed for celebration. Her marked elegance is echoed, farcically, by the party centerpiece—a black-and-white cake.

Chazen presides in a dapper ice cream suit, his every gesture punctuated by theatrical delight and a sly turn of phrase. His guests, the infamous Miss Gerde Engstrom (Sylvia Miles), with her heavy, kohl-rimmed eyes and signature leotard, and the enigmatic, silent Sandra (Beverly D’Angelo), wavy blonde, loose, and flowing, softly tousled and falling freely around her shoulders, watch Alison with animal wariness and calculated interest. Others sit alert, each one odder than the last: Gary Allen as the wormy bespectacled Malcolm Stinnett, the Clotkin sisters, and Kate Harrington, playing Mrs. Clark, who croaks, “black and white cat, black and white cake.”

Alison confides in Michael about her neighbors’ bizarre behavior, but when police detectives (Eli Wallach and Christopher Walken) later investigate, they find that none of the tenants she speaks about—and whose photos she identifies—are alive; in fact, they are all notorious murderers who died years ago.

Alison’s own reality continues to unravel. She is stalked by splitting headaches and dizzy spells, and finds old Latin books that no one else seems able to read. Sometimes, she glimpses the world as though in a dream or fugue, unable to distinguish nightmare from waking life. Her previous trauma, her father’s abuse, begins to haunt her in visions. In a particularly visceral and terrifying sequence, her father’s decaying corpse appears like a phantasm, forcing Alison to defend herself by slashing him with a butcher knife. The scene still evokes a shudder in me with all its grotesque physicality, as though the apartment is both haunting her and trapping her in her darkest memories, and her visions becoming more volatile.

The jarring sequence, perhaps one of the defining moments in 1970s horror cinema, begins when, from behind the cracked shadowing doorway, her father materializes, an apparition draped in cold, spectral light, first just a suggestion, a blue-lit wraith emerging silently from the gloom. His form hangs in the air, in an unseeing trance, cast in a cold, unnatural glow, with movements that are rigid, mechanical, and quickening, each step charged with the emptiness of a sleepwalker or specter, limbs skeletal and flesh waning, worn thin by time and vulgar memories. His hollow eyes gloss over her presence, a disquieting echo of the bastard he once was, now crumbling at the edges like ancient stone. His decaying presence, ghoulish yet strangely fragile, hovers in the doorway, unseeing, as if summoned from memory rather than from life, while the blue light washes all humanity from his features, leaving only the hollow echo of a man lost between worlds. It is only when her own tempest breaks free that the spell shatters, lashing out to wake the fading specter from his haunted stupor, she strikes out at him and runs.

Throughout these scenes, Father Halliran, the blind priest, is glimpsed wordlessly sitting in the window above, an ominous, unresolved presence. Alison tries to understand his role by seeking answers at the local cathedral, where she encounters the elusive Monsignor and from Michael, who becomes increasingly obsessed with protecting her.

Michael investigates the brownstone’s mysterious history, uncovering that every previous Sentinel—each a supposed “guardian”- was a suicide survivor, chosen by a secret Catholic order to watch over the gateway between Hell and Earth. Michael’s own past comes under scrutiny, as his involvement in his wife’s murder is revealed, mirroring the building’s legacy of violence and guilt.

As supernatural forces gather strength, within the brownstone, now revealed as the gateway to Hell, Chazen, who’s shed all traces of whimsy and now slips into a more devilish, dangerously sinister tone, orchestrates a nightmarish gathering. It all culminates in the film’s infamous hellscape finale, where a phantasmagoria of physically striking “damned souls” portrayed by real individuals with remarkable appearances fills the screen in a parade of shock and awe. These characters, all wordless, become the living architecture of the film’s horror, transforming the building into a grotesque gallery of the lost, the punished, and the peculiar.

As The Sentinel reaches its feverish climax, Alison Parker is drawn into the brownstone’s ghost-lit upper floors, terror mounting with every step. The air thickens with silent terror as Chazen, in full satanic maestro mode, summons his legions: the room seems to warp and bulge as his minions, those strange, spectral party guests from the cat gathering and beyond, emerge from the shadows and stairwells, shuffling and urgent.

Now lured to the top floor where Father Haliran sits guarding with blank eyes, Chazen and his surreal, nightmarish party guests, damned souls representing the dead murderers who now inhabit the building, reveal themselves to Alison in a scene that erupts into an inferno of horror and madness. Hell’s gate cracks open, and she faces their onslaught.

They are an unforgettable procession: figures both familiar and newly horrifying, some bearing wounds from their past crimes, others twisted with the marks of damnation. Faces once glimpsed at Chazen’s parties now leer with demonic intent, their eyes glittering with a hunger that is neither fully human nor wholly monstrous. The air shudders with their collective presence as they advance, a phantasmagoria of the lost who once murdered, betrayed, or despaired into oblivion, all brought back to serve as Hell’s foot soldiers.

Alison stands alone in Father Halliran’s apartment as the minions close in. They reach for her with clawed hands, mouths slack with anticipation, not simply to harm her, but to drive her to the edge of despair, to force her into the final act that would damn her soul forever. The walls seem to pulse, crawling with the damned as Chazen, his grin wide and voice lilting, orchestrates the onslaught like an unholy master of ceremonies.

The entire sequence is rendered with a surreal, nightmarish vividness: misshapen limbs, scarred bodies, lamentable rising into a hellish choir as the brownstone itself becomes a crucible for Alison’s soul. The minions’ descent is relentless, suffocating, and inescapable, pushing Alison toward the ultimate revelation of the Sentinel’s purpose and her own fate as the next unwilling guardian against eternal darkness.

Chazen seeks to prevent Alison from taking up the mantle of Sentinel, he hands her a knife and whispers to her sweetly like a lovesong or a prayer, or like a dark covenant, its cold weight pressing upon her unwillingness and fear. He tries to seduce her into killing herself. The exchange symbolizes a testing of will, Alison’s fragile grip on reality tightening as Chazen’s sinister intentions loom.

While the spiritual forces, including the presence of the Monsignor and Father Haliran, remain watchers at first, rather than active interveners in that tense instant, until they hand over a cross as Alison resists Hell and endures, fulfilling her unwitting destiny. Michael, now damned for his own sins, tries to stop her but is killed. As Chazen’s sinister scheme unravels, the demonic horde recoils, wailing shadows retreating in a swirling, suffocating vacuum, their twisted forms dissolving into the abyss. On screen, the air seems to convulse and contract as a spectral dissolve sweeps through the room, engulfing the monstrous presences until only silence remains, while Chazen’s furious glare seethes with bitter rage, powerless against his defeat. Alison’s attempt to escape her ultimate path either way is futile; after Monsignor arrives and the cross is passed, she succumbs to her fate.

This sequence captures The Sentinel’s creepy ride from psychological dread to supernatural horror, with an escalating blend of bizarre encounters, unnerving set pieces, and a finale that fuses Catholic mythology with urban paranoia and bleak, cyclical fate.

The final scene returns to the apartment building. Time has passed. Miss Logan, now showing the apartment to a new tenant, passes the top floor, where the blind priest once sat. The camera lingers: Alison Parker, now blind and dressed in her simple nun’s habit, sits vigil in the window, an unmoving presence and the building’s latest eternal guardian.

The film ends with an air of tragic inevitability; the gateway to Hell is held at bay once again, but only at the cost of Alison’s life, eternal soul, and selfhood, as her friends and the world outside remain oblivious to the darkness contained within the quiet brownstone.

The film’s impact was felt squarely in the post-Exorcist, post-Rosemary’s Baby wave of satanic cinema, fitting effortlessly alongside The Omen in its fascination with urban damnation and the breakdown between the physical world and infernal forces. The Sentinel pushes the envelope with its blend of grindhouse sensationalism, savage cinema, transgressive, as much as an old-fashioned Gothic spook show, deploying both prosthetic make-up and the parade of real, physically distinctive actors in Hell’s finale that remains controversial and unforgettable. Dick Smith, known for groundbreaking work on The Exorcist, contributed several memorable effects. While most of the physical deformities on screen are real, some are enhanced or wholly created by Smith’s prosthetic artistry.

And Gil Mellé’s evocative music pours sinister, beautiful dread across the film like spilled red wine over the sacrificial altar.

Critical reaction at the time was mixed, as befits a film so shamelessly baroque: Robert Bookbinder, a noted film scholar, wrote in his 1982 book The Films of the Seventies: “It is undoubtedly one of the most terrifying interludes in seventies cinema.”

While The New York Times hailed its “Chilling, stylish atmosphere, like a demonic fairy tale for adults.” For all the controversy over its parade of grotesques, its lurid jolts, and its freewheeling collage of acting styles, The Sentinel lingers, smoky, nightmarish, and resolutely unclassifiable, a bridge in both narrative and spirit between classic Hollywood Gothic and the unapologetic depravity of late-70s horror.

For those of you who appreciate their demonic cinema with a side of high-art camp, haunted cityscapes, and a who’s who of vintage screen legends, The Sentinel is a delicious descent, with Burgess Meredith, perched midway between Mephistopheles and Catskills emcee, poised at the center, grinning into the abyss.

#130 down, 20 to go! Your EverLovin’ Joey, formally & affectionately known as MonsterGirl!

 

MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #126 Scanners 1981

SCANNERS 1981

Whenever I return to Cronenberg’s Scanners (1981), I can’t help but feel like I’m plunging headlong into a hallucinatory waking night terror—a film that fuses body horror, science fiction, and psychological thriller into something both mesmerizing and deeply unsettling. For me, it’s not just a volatile movie about psychic battles or exploding heads (though it has those in unforgettable measure); it’s a fiercely intelligent exploration into themes of power, identity, and control, all refracted through Cronenberg’s signature, clinical surrealism and preoccupation with body horror. Watching it, I get the sense I’m witnessing a turning point, not just for Cronenberg himself as he leans fully into his own distinctive vision, but for the entire landscape of horror cinema. There’s a rare charge to Scanners that makes each viewing feel freshly strange and relevant.

Scanners spins a wild tale about a crew of renegade “scanners”, humans with mind-bending psychic abilities, pulling together to grab power and rewrite the rules. But their plans hit a serious snag: one lone, untainted scanner isn’t about to let their world-domination plot go unchecked.

For me, at its very heart, the world of Scanners is this electrifying portrayal of the raw, violent potential locked inside psychic powers, centering on a rare breed of individuals; a “mutant class” who share extraordinary abilities, can invade minds, and unleash devastating telekinetic fury. They are an elite and current-haunted cabal who can get inside your head, twist your thoughts, and let loose psychic destruction with staggering force.

Oh, that memorably, explosive scene—the one where a character’s head literally blows apart like an overfilled balloon that pops in all its gory detail, still shocks me every time I see it, a moment so viscerally graphic in spectacle, it’s become a landmark not just for its horror effects, but it remains a defining moment in horror cinema, one we still all recognize as the dawn into daylight of modern horror.

That poor guy’s head blowing a gasket, going all fireworks and meat confetti, literally blowing his brains out!, Though thrilling for us, it only crystallizes the film’s brutal meditation on how fragile our control over ourselves really is, and how close we all are to unraveling under unseen pressures.

Scanner’s shocking, mind-blowing moment transcends mere gratuitous provocation; it also functions as a deliberate catalyst that shines a light on the film’s deeper meanings.

The story unfolds around Cameron Vale (a deer in the headlights, Stephen Lack), a drifter burdened by mysterious voices in his head. His discovery and induction into a clandestine corporate world is the start of his profound odyssey of self-discovery and survival. Cameron learns that he is one of the “scanners,” the secret society of people born with extraordinary telepathic and telekinetic powers, a biological mutation possibly induced by a since-abandoned drug program.

The film’s conflict is propelled by Cameron’s pursuit to stop Darryl Revok (played by the eternally imposing Michael Ironside), a rogue scanner with a messianic vision to wage war against conformity and control, a battle that rolls forward like a gritty road trip or a high-stakes psychic chess match, embodying a mythic clash evocative of archetypal rivalries, like brothers Cain and Abel, where inherited power fractures into opposition and bad blood.

Cronenberg’s direction layers the futuristic premise with allegorical weight, subtly addressing the fears and anxieties of the early 1980s, a period rife with Cold War tensions, burgeoning corporate surveillance, the explosive rise of new technology, and shifting cultural identities that were set aflame during the Regan era. Beneath the pulpy surface, Scanners reflects a meditation on the alienation of individuals gifted or cursed, however you look at it, with powers beyond social norms, their bodies battlegrounds where psychic wounds inflict physical devastation.

These themes resonated with Cronenberg’s evolving fascination with the body’s vulnerability and the thin boundary separating self from other, sanity from madness.

Stephen Lack as Cameron Vale brings a haunting detachment to the role of a man struggling to master an overwhelming gift, while Michael Ironside’s Darryl Revok is a charismatic yet terrifying antagonist whose zealotry and cruelty escalate the tension with magnetic intensity.

Included in the cast are two other notable actors worth paying tribute to. When I watch Scanners, I always find myself drawn in by the grounding presence of Jennifer O’Neill and Patrick McGoohan. O’Neill, as Kim Obrist, brings a steadying warmth and quiet grace that makes the chaos around her feel more human and immediate. I can’t help but empathize with her as the psychic turbulence ramps up. I recently met the underappreciated actress at Chiller Theater, and was so taken with her kindness, grace, and gentility—a woman who is still as breathtakingly beautiful as she ever was. And then there’s McGoohan as Dr. Paul Ruth, whose enigmatic sharpness and pained intensity give the whole story its moral and intellectual spine. For me, their performances don’t just drive the plot; they tend to pull me deeper into the emotional twists and ethical gray areas at the heart of the film, making the stakes feel personal and strangely intimate than the more unearthly, wooden, or sharply eccentric performances by the darkly twinned fated rivals.

Tara Aquino writes in her article for Mental Floss in 2016 – It’s no surprise that Cronenberg allegedly called Scanners his most frustrating film to make. In addition to delays in filming, the script wasn’t even completed when production commenced. “Not only was Scanners not rehearsed, but it wasn’t written,” Lack told Film Comment. “David was coming in with pink, blue, and yellow pages for the day for the version of the script that we were doing, and he was working on it right there. As a result I had to deal with the dialogue in such a way that I was not reacting to things, because the information hadn’t been given to my character in the linear progression of the story. If you chop it up and look at it, 50 percent of my dialogue is not an assertion of anything but rather a question: ‘You called me a Scanner, what does that mean?’ ‘You’re part of an organization, who are you?’ Everything is a freaking question!”

The corporation in Scanners is ConSec, a shady security conglomerate that seeks to control scanners as weapons for its own agenda. Rather than uniting the scanners, ConSec aims to harness and exploit them, seeing their psychic talents as assets in a burgeoning war for corporate dominance and security.

The other scanners are caught in the crossfire, with some manipulated by ConSec, others recruited or coerced into the militant rebellion led by the hostile antagonist Revok, and a few struggling to survive in secret or find their own path.

Jennifer O’Neill’s character, Kim, is a key scanner who becomes Cameron Vale’s ally. She helps him navigate the dangers and moral complexity of their world while resisting corporate and revolutionary manipulation. McGoohan, as Dr. Paul Ruth, serves as ConSec’s expert on scanners, acting as Vale’s sage. He plays a crucial role in connecting him to the scientific and conspiratorial elements that help the plot unfold.

For me, what intensifies the film’s core horror is the sense that invisible disturbances beneath the self can erupt without warning, turning internal fractures into seismic, unmissable events. But, beyond the spectacle lies a thoughtful exploration of autonomy versus manipulation. Cameron’s journey is a liminal one, caught between these forces while wrestling with his own fractured identity. It reflects a broader human struggle with power, responsibility, paranoia, and the desire for connection, all while under the spell and in the silent orbit of isolation.

What never fails to give me a jolt is how Scanners feels ahead of its time in capturing that deep, existential fear of losing control, not just of what we do, but of our own minds and bodies. It’s a fear that’s only grown sharper with the rise of constant surveillance and the profoundly tricky ethical questions technology throws at us today. The film taps into this increasing anxiety so well, making you feel that fragile line between self-possession, bioethical uncertainty, and being overwhelmed by forces beyond your grasp.

The telepathic invasions, mind control, and bodily destruction become metaphors not only for personal disintegration but also for societal paranoia, where boundaries between self and state, mind and machine, belonging and other, and trust and betrayal blur.

Scanner’s pacing feels deliberate and carefully measured as it slowly pulls you in with a steady build-up, then hits you over the exploding head with sudden bursts of explosive violence that ignite the synapses, balanced by quieter moments filled with creeping psychological unease. It’s this rhythm of tension and release that keeps the atmosphere charged and really draws you deep into the unsettling world Cronenberg creates for us.

Early scenes introduce Cameron’s alienation and vulnerability, followed by his induction and training sequences that evoke a disquieting rite of passage. The escalating psychic confrontations lead up to a climactic showdown that mixes cerebral strategy with visceral horror. The finale’s ambiguity—where identities merge and control slips away—leaves us truly unsettled, inviting interpretation about the costs of power and the fragility of selfhood.

According to Michael Ironside, who played Darryl Revok, he and Stephen Lack filmed a less exciting version of the ending. “With one ending, we had this psycho-battle between my brother and I and it didn’t work, we shot it right up until Christmas and sent the script to [special effects wizard] Dick Smith in New York and asked him what he could come up with in terms of cutting edge makeup,” Ironside, “You know, something that would give us a more memorable battle and a different ending. Dick then came up with the idea of the exploding heads and that was a very collaborative thing.” -Mental Floss Tara Aquino 2016

Visually, Scanners is, of course, notable for its pioneering special effects, choreographed with bone-chilling precision. These symbolize the ultimate loss of control, the mind’s destructive power given form in visceral flesh.

Cronenberg’s body horror and the use of his special effects team’s sophisticated prosthetics mark Scanners as a highlight of practical effects innovation in the early 1980s, helping establish the director’s reputation as a master of visceral cinematic storytelling.

When the scanners tap into their powers, their faces transform into a network of dark veins that snake across their skin, pulsing with unseen energy. Their eyes turn ghostly white, as if smoke itself is burning behind them, signaling the fierce and dangerous force building within.

The special effects for Scanners (1981) were primarily crafted by Gary Zeller, who played a crucial role in bringing to life the film’s groundbreaking and visceral visual moments. Zeller was responsible for supervising the effects that gave Scanners its unforgettable impact, including the iconic exploding head scene. His work on Scanners joins an impressive résumé that includes his work on Dawn of the Dead (1978), showcasing his skill in creating memorable effects under demanding conditions.

In addition to Zeller’s contributions, makeup effects legend Dick Smith, renowned for his work on Linda Blair giving her that poster girl look for demonic possession and the skincare routine that looks like “hell” in The Exorcist, provided prosthetics for the film’s climactic scenes, including the exploding head effects. Smith did an incredible job using his signature artistry in translating Cronenberg’s intense, often harrowing vision, breathing life into a physical reality, and creating something tangible on screen. Finally, special effects artist Chris Walas, who later worked on Cronenberg’s The Fly and Naked Lunch, also contributed to the exploding head sequence, pushing the boundaries of practical effects at the time.

Film historians and critics alike lauded their work in Scanners for its creativity, technical brilliance, and integral role in conveying the film’s dark meditation on control and violence. The visual magic they brought to the table became a defining metaphor for the destructive potential of psychic power.

But the illusionary visuals do more than jar; they unravel the fragile seams of the mind, spilling inner chaos into the open, exposing the psychic fault lines beneath us, rupturing the surface, forcing hidden tremors to crack open and flow into the visible world.

The special effects physically externalize psychic and psychological breaking points, emphasizing one of the film’s primary horrors: the invasion of the self by external forces, whether conscious influence, pharmaceutical, or corporate. The shadowy corporation ConSec embodies the cold mechanics of control, seeking to weaponize scanners, while Revok represents anarchic rebellion, fighting to overturn a system that would suppress their existence.

In the Criterion Collection’s documentary The Scanners Way (2014), the special effects team discussed how the exploding head scene was achieved through ingenious practical methods, including shooting a gelatin-encased plaster skull filled with unconventional materials like leftover burgers. As someone who loves a good hamburger, I have to admit: seeing one sacrificed for the greater cause of cinematic head explosions feels both deliciously wrong and kind of inspiring. They also used latex scraps, blasted with a shotgun to create the convincingly explosive effect.

Critics such as Roger Ebert and sources like The Criterion Collection have noted that the special effects elevate Scanners beyond typical genre fare: “Every special effect is an idea,” emphasizing how the effects serve the film’s intellectual and thematic ambitions.

Scholar and film critic Kristin Thompson praised the ingenuity and craftsmanship, remarking that the effects contribute to “a visceral sense of psychic rupture and bodily invasion,” seamlessly integrating with Cronenberg’s exploration of mind and body.

The unsettling soundscape and Tony DeBenedictis’s synthesizer-tinged score amplify the claustrophobic, paranoid atmosphere, blending seamlessly with Mark Irwin’s dark, clinical cinematography that renders both urban and interior spaces as arenas of psychological conflict. Irwin also worked with Cronenberg on The Brood (1979), Videodrome (1983) The Dead Zone (1983) and The Fly (1986).

Ultimately, Cronenberg’s Scanners transcends its B-movie aesthetics to become a penetrating study of being at the crossroads of identity, control, and the body-mind connection, using science fiction and horror as a way to hold up a mirror to reflect and explore profound psychological and social anxieties.

Scanner’s legacy has lasted this long not only because of its groundbreaking effects but also because of its acute commentary on the perilous balance between human autonomy and the invasive forces, internal and external, that seek to dismantle it.

#126 down, 24 to go! Your EverLovin’ Joey, formally & affectionately known as MonsterGirl!

Sunday Nite Surreal: The Sentinel (1977) Even in Hell, Friendships often Blossom into Bliss!

 

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“THERE MUST FOREVER BE A GUARDIAN AT THE GATE FROM HELL”

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THE SENTINEL 1977

I’ve written enough here at The Last Drive In to sort of feel more relaxed about letting it rip sometimes. I’m hoping you’ll indulge me a bit while I go off on a tiny rant. I hope that’s alright. Michael Winner’s film was a failure at the box office. So what!

You will undoubtedly read 9 out of 10 reviewers who will make too convenient a statement about The Sentinel being a Rosemary’s Baby rip-off. In terms of how I experience this film, there’s more to it than just a pat dismissal and a flip accusation of being derivative. I had first read Jeffrey Konvitz’s book when it was published in 1974, and then went to the movies to see his adapted screenplay The Sentinel during its theatrical release– I was a ripe 15-year-old who was captivated by the grotesque and eerie imagery.

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Perhaps there is a conscious connection or homage made by director Winner between the devilish residents of the infamous Bramford Arms with its history of murderers and deviants –the facade filmed of New York Cities Dakota with a birds’ eye view of Central Park as Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse move into their house of Hades in Rosemary’s Baby 1968, my favorite film that transcends any genre.

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Alison Parker (Christina Raines) comes in contact with a similar Gothic building filled with oddball characters who wind up being the ghosts of murderers who once lived in the impressive Brownstone. I imagine the gateway to Hell would attract an evil ensemble of nasties. And to counterbalance Alison as the woman-in-peril who must fight off the paranoia and heady mind games of the devil and his minions, who toy with Alison in order to drive her mad enough to try once again to commit suicide. Rosemary Woodhouse has the perseverance to keep her devils at bay and hold onto her precious baby even if he were to carry on his father’s legacy. Either way, it’s both buildings filled with eccentrics and the fog of paranoia that tie the two films together for me, but that’s where it ends.

As an amateur film buff and classic horror film aficionado, I think I have some authority when weighing in on whether director Michael Winner’s The Sentinel is just derivative dreck. And I discovered that it’s not just the average chimer-in nudnik on IMDb who feels the need to review this film in such a simplistic way that making the comparison to Rosemary’s Baby feels like just a cop-out to me.

It is even referred to as such in writer John Kenneth Muir’s entirely comprehensive book Horror Films of the 1970s– citing two film reviews during the time of The Sentinel’s theatrical release.

Look, as far back as its theatrical release, the critique was to lump all “devil in the city” and “good vs. evil” tropes with the 1968 seminal film by Roman Polanski, based on Ira Levin’s novel Rosemary’s Baby.

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“a crude and obvious imitation of Rosemary’s Baby, but much creepier and more bizarre. The unnerving ending obliterates the memory of the rest of the film makes good use of several past-their prime actors in small roles but attempts at psychological insight, subtlety or believability fall flat. The great special effects at the end justify the film’s faults however.” Darrell Moore. The Best, Worst and Most Unusual: Horror films, Crowne publishing 1983.

February 12, 1977 from The New York Times written by Richard Eder -“The confrontations are supposed to be terrifying but the most they offer is some mild creepiness. Mr. Winner has sweetened the mess with some nudity, a little masturbation and a dash of lesbianism.”

Interesting that the one bit of titillation Richard Eder manages to pluck out is lesbianism. In fact, that seems to be of most interest to many reviewers. Well, it’s 2016, and if a lesbian pops up in a film, it’s now about as outmoded and the shock obsolete as the landline and mullets… well, I have seen people still sporting mullets.

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And I’d like to say there’s more than mild creepiness; there are absolute moments of mind-jolting terror. The exquisite color palette and the eye for detail support the sense of mystery, such as the fabulous Houdini poster in Michael’s apartment, a centerpiece in plain sight that one might miss. However, it is there to instruct us on our journey through the dark maze of the storyline.

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If anything, the film lies closer in relationship to Roman Polanski’s The Tenant (1976) where another protagonist Trelkovsky portrayed by Polanski himself, is being gaslighted and mentally tortured by a group of people (Shelley Winters, Lila Kedrova, and Jo Van Fleet) in his building that may or may not exist ultimately driving him to attempt suicide. The fact that our heroine Alison is driven to madness and suicide by her seemingly harmless yet strange and quirky neighbors, who are actually unholy denizens of hell, definitely evokes comparisons in my mind with Roman Polanski’s equally disturbing The Tenant (1976).

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I’d even go as far as to compare director Michael Winner and writer Jeffrey Konvitz’s film to have something of an Alejandro Jodorowsky flavor to it, with the grotesque imagery and surreal procession. Or might have influenced the very hallucinatory Jacob’s Ladder (1990), which deals with a soul’s nightmarish journey through unfathomable realms of consciousness while he navigates a hellish limbo, that conjures demons and angels alike.

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With The Sentinel some people are fascinated, some are repulsed and some just think The Sentinel is truly a retread of Polanski/Castle’s superior masterpiece.

Continue reading “Sunday Nite Surreal: The Sentinel (1977) Even in Hell, Friendships often Blossom into Bliss!”