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 1970, Hair 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.

Witness Mr. Burgess Meredith, a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers.

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.

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