MonsterGirl’s 150 Days of Classic Horror #75 The Haunting of Julia 1977

THE HAUNTING OF JULIA AKA FULL CIRCLE 1977

The Haunting of Julia 1977 left a profound mark on me from the very first viewing- its spectral melancholy and chilling atmosphere lingered long after the credits rolled, unsettling me in ways few ghost stories ever have. Mia Farrow’s performance broke my heart; she embodies Julia’s grief and fragility with such aching vulnerability that I found myself deeply moved, even haunted, by her every gesture and glance.

This is a classical ghost story, yes, but its edges are disturbingly sharp, and its undercurrents of trauma and loss are rendered with rare elegance and restraint. The film’s hypnotic visuals and mournful score draw you into a world where sorrow and the supernatural are inseparable, and its shocking revelations still echo in my mind. It’s a film I want to explore at length on The Last Drive In, because its haunting power and emotional depth have made it one of the most affecting horror experiences along my journey as a disciple of haunted cinema and worship at the altar of vintage chills with classic horror cinema.

Versatile British filmmaker Richard Loncraine, acclaimed for his work in both film and television, known for his ability to move fluidly between genres, directs The Haunting of Julia (1977), also known as Full Circle. The film is a chilling meditation on grief, loss, trauma, guilt, and the inescapable shadows of the past.

From the film’s opening moments, The Haunting of Julia left me breathless- a quiet devastation settling over me like winter mist, each scene echoing with the ache of loss. The film’s sorrowful atmosphere did not merely stun; it reached into the hollow places of my own memory, awakening a personal ache and a sense of kinship with Julia’s grief. Mia Farrow’s performance is a study in fragile resilience, her every gesture and hollow-eyed glance resonating with the pain of a mother unmoored, searching for meaning in the aftermath of tragedy. The opening death scene of her little girl is rendered with startling realism, agonizing intensity, and harrowing trauma. It calls to mind the haunting prologue of Roeg’s film, where Donald Sutherland cradles his lifeless daughter, lost to the water in Don’t Look Now 1974.

As the story spirals toward its haunting denouement, Julia’s journey becomes both tragic and bittersweet. In her final act, offering herself up to the spectral, malevolent child in a desperate hope of reunion with her lost daughter, she surrenders to the very darkness she’s tried to escape.

The film’s conclusion lingers like a bruise: a mother’s yearning transformed into sacrifice, love and loss entwined in a chilling embrace. It is a haunting not just of houses or spirits, but of the heart itself, where the longing for the lost can be both a wound and a refuge.

Adapted from Peter Straub’s novel Julia, the film envelops the viewer in a wintry, melancholic London where every corner seems to resonate with absence and the ache of sad memories, and every shadow hints at a restless spirit. Loncraine, whose career spans genres but who excels at evoking psychological unease, directs with a restrained hand, allowing dread to seep in through atmosphere rather than overt shock.

The film opens with a scene of domestic tragedy: Julia Lofting (Mia Farrow) loses her daughter Kate in a harrowing choking accident, a moment captured with excruciating intimacy and a sense of helplessness that reverberates throughout the film. This trauma fractures Julia’s life and psyche, propelling her to leave her controlling husband Magnus (Keir Dullea who is a master at being controlling in most of his roles – Bunny Lake is Missing 1965, Black Christmas 1974 and The Fox 1967 ) and seek refuge in a grand but somber house in Holland Park. The house itself becomes a character- a mausoleum of faded childhood, its rooms heavy with the residue of past lives, its silence broken by inexplicable noises and the sudden, spectral chill of unseen presences. Especially the malevolent spirit of a golden-haired child, her angelic face a mask for a soul steeped in malice, innocence entwined with the chilling sadism and cunning of a devil.

Loncraine’s direction is marked by visual lyricism and a painterly use of space and shadow. The score by Colin Towns weaves a melancholic, almost lullaby-like motif through the film, amplifying the sense of longing and sorrow that clings to Julia’s every step.

Mia Farrow, in a performance of haunted fragility, anchors the film. Her Julia is a woman unmoored, her pixie-cut and wide, searching eyes reminiscent of her iconic turn in Rosemary’s Baby, here noticeably breakable, as if she might shatter under the weight of her memories. Farrow conveys Julia’s grief in every gesture-her tentative movements, her soft voice, her desperate hope that the ghostly presence she senses might be her lost daughter. Keir Dullea is icy and menacing as Magnus, whose attempts to reclaim Julia are tinged with both possessiveness and denial. Tom Conti, as Julia’s friend Mark, provides warmth and skepticism, grounding the film’s more supernatural turns.

The narrative unfolds as a slow-burning mystery, with Julia’s search for answers drawing her into the house’s dark history. A séance scene, led by the unnerving Mrs. Flood (Anna Wing), crackles with tension as the boundary between the living and the dead seems to dissolve. The film’s horror is subtle and psychological. Appliances flicker on by themselves, a child’s laughter echoes in empty rooms, and glimpses of a mysterious girl in the park blur the line between reality and apparition.

Julia’s investigation leads her to uncover a decades-old crime involving a sadistic child, Olivia, whose cruelty orchestrated the ritualistic murder of a young boy, Geoffrey. The revelation that the house’s haunting is rooted not in Julia’s own loss but in the malice of another child gives the film its most chilling twist.

The cinematography in The Haunting of Julia, crafted by Peter Hannan, is central to the film’s chilling and melancholic atmosphere. Hannan bathes the film in cold, muted tones, making London’s wintry streets and the cavernous house feel both beautiful and oppressive. At the same time, wide shots of London and the camera linger on the house’s empty corridors, dust motes swirling in pale light, and mirrors that seem to reflect more than just the living. It all emphasizes Julia’s loneliness and vulnerability. Interiors are rendered with impressionistic attention to shadow and light, turning the house into a labyrinth of memory and menace, while the use of natural light and soft focus lends many scenes an almost spectral, dreamlike quality.

Close-ups reveal the fine details of faces and textures, drawing viewers intimately into Julia’s fragile world. Hannan’s camera captures foggy grays, blues, and earthy browns that evoke a sense of perpetual season of sleep with it’s quiet hush and emotional isolation, mirroring Julia’s grief and psychological unease.

The cinematography often suggests the supernatural without showing it directly, lingering on those empty spaces, mirrors, and subtle movements in the background, creating a tension that is more unsettling for its restraint. This visual approach, reminiscent of films like Don’t Look Now, allows the atmosphere of dread and sorrow to seep into every frame, making the haunting as much psychological as it is spectral.

In the shadowed heart of Julia’s new home, hovers the ghost of a golden-haired child; her angelic beauty hides a dark heart. Olivia-fair and delicate as a porcelain doll-once ruled the neighborhood children with a beguiling cruelty, her laughter a siren’s call that led the innocent astray. Under her command, games turned to rituals of torment, and the line between childhood mischief and monstrousness blurred until, one day, she orchestrated the ritualistic murder of a gentle boy in the park- a crime so unspeakable that its memory still poisons the air decades later.

The truth unspools in a scene heavy with sorrow and dread, as Julia seeks out Mrs. Rudge (Cathleen Nesbitt), Olivia’s mother, in the faded gloom of a psychiatric home. With trembling voice and haunted eyes, Mrs. Rudge confesses the unbearable burden she carried: realizing her daughter’s heart was a vessel for evil, she ended Olivia’s life in a desperate act of mercy, suffocating her watching as she gasps for air, hoping to silence the darkness that had taken root within her own flesh and blood.

Mrs. Rudge warns, “Evil never dies”– Olivia’s spirit, with her cherubic face and devil’s heart, permeates still, with a whisper of malice in every shadow, drawing the grieving and the lost into her circle of the damned.

Key scenes linger in the mind: Julia’s first, fleeting sighting of the ghostly girl; the séance, where terror is conjured not by what is seen, but by what is felt; Magnus’s death, as he is lured to the basement and meets a gruesome, accidental end; He falls down the stairs and fatally cuts his throat on a broken mirror pane, Tom Conti who plays Mark Berkeley, Julia’s friend, later meets a tragic end by electrocution in a bathtub.

And the film’s finale, where Julia, seeking communion with her daughter, instead becomes the final victim of the house’s vengeful spirit. The film’s pacing is deliberate, its scares understated, but its atmosphere of sorrow and foreboding is inescapable.

The Haunting of Julia is less a conventional ghost story than a study in the ways grief can hollow a person out, leaving them vulnerable to the past’s unfinished business. Loncraine crafts a world where the supernatural is a metaphor for unresolved trauma, and where the most terrifying hauntings are those we carry within. The film’s poetic terror lies in its restraint, its ability to suggest that what is most frightening is not the ghost in the shadows, but the ache of loss that never leaves.

#75 down, 75 to go! Your EverLovin’ Joey, formally & affectionately known as MonsterGirl!

Black Christmas (1974) Bob Clark’s darker Christmas Story “Filthy Billy, I know what you did, nasty Billy!”

BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974)

Directed by Bob Clark (Porky’s 1981, A Christmas Story 1983) Screenplay by Roy Moore (She Cried Murder 1973 tv movie) Cinematographer Reginald H. Morris (When Michael Calls 1972 tv movie, The Food of the Gods 1976, Murder by Decree 1979, Phobia 1980, A Christmas Story 1983).

Reg Morris’ cinematography brings the shadowy moodiness that was the atmospheric style of When Michael Calls a suspenseful made for tv movie in the early 1970s. Cinematographer Albert J. Dunk created Billy’s POV shots by rigging up a camera harness that would mount the camera on his shoulder as he walked about the house and climbed the trellis and attic ladder himself.

Ironically, Clark who has created a deeply dark and disturbing tale set during Christmas, is responsible for one of the most authentically nostalgic, witty, and whimsical tributes to Christmas, the most beloved A Christmas Story. For a director to create the most splendid narrative that reminisces about a more innocent time, it remains a huge cult indulgence every Holiday Season, as we all collectively love to watch Ralph maneuver through the obstacles in his way of getting a Red Rider BB gun. Darren McGavin is brilliant as his old man whose expletives are still floating over Lake Michigan and the soft glow of electric sex in the window from that fabulously kitschy leg lamp. We’ve got one giving off that soft glow as I write this.

Black Christmas stars Olivia Hussey as Jess Bradford, Keir Dullea as Peter Smythe, and Margot Kidder as Barbara. Marian Waldman (When Michael Calls 1972 tv movie, Deranged 1974, Phobia 1980) as Mrs. MacHenry, Andrea Martin as Phyl, James Edmond as Mr. Harrison, Douglas McGrath as Sergeant Nash, Art Hindle as Chris, Lynn Griffin as Clare Harrison, Michael Rapport as Patrick,  and John Saxon as Lt. Fuller. As an interesting note-Nick Mancuso plays the caller/intruder/psycho.

Continue reading “Black Christmas (1974) Bob Clark’s darker Christmas Story “Filthy Billy, I know what you did, nasty Billy!””

Bunny Lake is Missing (1965) & Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964): Otto Preminger/Bryan Forbes -‘A Conspiracy of Madness’: Part 1

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Doll-maker: “This doll had almost been loved to death. You know, love inflicts the most terrible injuries on my small patients.”

BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING (1965)

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Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965) (British) is director/producer Otto Preminger’s psychological thriller, considered to be part of the noir cannon or Post-Noir yet embraces the suspense thriller sub-genre. A thriller about a little girl who may or may not exist! The film deals with the dread of losing yourself, not being believed, and childhood nightmares that are rooted in the sense of lack of safety in the environment where they should be protected.

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Starring Carol Lynley (The Cardinal 1963, Shock Treatment 1964, The Shuttered Room 1967) as Ann Lake and Keir Dullea (2001: A Space Odyssey 1968, Black Christmas 1974) as brother Stephen Lake, the Americans who relocate to London and exude a mysteriously emotionless manner even when they act frenzied, enraged or frantically distressed.

The film also stars Laurence Olivier as Superintendent Newhouse, Martita Hunt as retired head schoolmistress Ada Ford, Anna Massey as the uptight Elvira Smollett, Clive Revill as Sergeant Andrews, playwright Noel Coward as Horatio Wilson, the lewd, drunken, seedy and lecherous Landlord who is creepy and inappropriate as he carries his little dog Samantha around with him everywhere. He’s also got a wicked whip collection… one which was once owned by the ‘master himself’ the Marquis de Sade.

Otto Preminger and Laurence Olivier on the set of Bunny Lake
Otto Preminger and Laurence Olivier on the set of Bunny Lake.
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Otto Preminger and Noel Coward who plays the lascivious Horatio Wilson on the set of Bunny Lake Is Missing.

Finlay Currie plays the kindly old Doll Maker, Adrienne Corri is the disagreeable Dorothy, and Lucie Mannheim plays the irascible German cook.

Preminger filmed Bunny Lake Is Missing in stunning black & white using a widescreen format on location in London, hiring Director of Photography and cameraman Denys Coop (The Third Man 1949, Saint Joan 1957, Lolita 1962 and Billy Lair 1963) and Production Designer Don Ashton.

The story is based on the mystery novel by Marryam Modell using the pseudonym Evelyn Piper (who also wrote the novel, The Nanny 1965  brilliantly adapted to the screen starring Bette Davis as a very sympathetic yet disturbed nanny) With a screenplay by John and Penelope Mortimer, Preminger adapted Piper’s original novel and reoriented the story taking it out of New York and placing it in heart of London.

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Seth Holt directs my favorite- Bette Davis in The Nanny- a 1965 adaptation of Marryam Modell’s novel.

The incredibly striking, simplistic, and evocative score was composed by Paul Glass (Lady in a Cage 1964) and used not only in the opening titles designed effectively by the great Saul Bass but the theme is used frequently as a childlike refrain, poignant and moving. The British group The Zombies also appear in a television broadcast, featuring three of their songs, “Remember You”, “Just Out of Reach” and “Nothing’s Changed.”

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No one designs a title sequence like Saul Bass… each one evocative, primal… yet simplistic at its very core.

Hope Bryce (Anatomy of a Murder 1959, Exodus 1960, Advise and Consent 1962) was responsible for the Costume design.

A standout performance is Martita Hunt, the wonderful British character actress who was in Boris Karloff’s Thriller episode as the batty aunt Celia Sommerville in The Last of The Summervilles. Here, she plays the school’s eccentric retired old headmistress Ada Ford who listens incessantly to recordings of little children who tell their nightmares and dreams recorded on her reel-to-reel tape machine.

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The fabulous Martita Hunt as the batty Celia Sommerville co-stars Phyllis Thaxter as the cunning cousin Ursula Sommerville in one of the great episodes of Boris Karloff’s anthology television series THRILLER.

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Columbia Pictures actually wanted Otto Preminger to cast Jane Fonda as Ann Lake, and Fonda was very anxious to play the role, but Preminger insisted on using Carol Lynley.

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Carol Lynley as Ann Lake.

Much like the hype of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, audiences were not allowed to tell the film’s ending. The film’s poster promoted the tagline “No One Admitted While the Clock is Ticking” I will also choose not to reveal the film’s coda in this post, so as not to give away the culmination of the film’s secrets or its finale.

This was one of Preminger’s last films with a Noir milieu, since The Man With The Golden Arm 1955 starring Frank Sinatra.

Preminger and Frank Sinatra on the set of Man With The Golden Arm
Preminger and Frank Sinatra on the set of Man With The Golden Arm (1955).

Within the film’s openness, and its various environments, it appears that several of the frames are cluttered with visual odds and ends and bits and pieces, the sequence with the unbroken view of dolls, Wilson’s African masks, and whips all evidence of the film’s sense of Fetishism.

Bunny Lake is Missing has a visual openness and fluidity which gives the film a striking dimension. The sweeping camerawork is familiar from the noir days of Preminger’s epic Laura (1944), although here it breaks away more completely from the enclosed environs of the 40s noir film.

Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney in Premingers iconic noir Laura
Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney in Preminger’s iconic noir classic Laura (1944).

Denys Coop’s diligent camera seems to peek into corners, moving through doors and up and down those iconographic STAIRS becoming part of the film’s fretful and apprehensive rhythm. Coop uses peculiar camera angles and lights his subjects from below in order to distort the mood, and throw odd uncomfortable shadows on their faces.

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An odd angle as the camera catches Ann Lake coming up the iconographic noir stairs. The visual Images are often a little skewed in Bunny Lake.
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While Ann talks with the quirky Ada Ford, her face is lit from underneath giving her an ethereal, fairytale-like glimmer.

BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING: THE SYNOPSIS

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A single American mother Ann Lake (Carol Lynley relocates to London England to live with her journalist brother Stephen (Keir Dullea), Ann drops off her four-year-old daughter Felicia nicknamed ‘Bunny’ on the first day at her new nursery school “The Little People’s Garden.” When Ann returns to see how Bunny is getting on in school, she can not find a teacher or administrator present, except for a cranky German cook who is complaining about serving Junket (which is essentially gruel) played by Lucie Mannheim. Ann is forced to leave Bunny unsupervised in the building’s ‘first-day’ room under the promise by the cranky cook that she will look after the child. Ann must rush to meet the movers who are awaiting her at the new apartment. When Ann returns in the afternoon to pick up her little girl, the cook has quit, and she becomes distressed when Bunny is nowhere to be found and the school’s employees Elvira Smollett (Anna Massey) and Dorothy (Adrienne Corri) who are left in charge fervently obstruct Ann’s attempts at locating Bunny even denying that the little girl was ever at the school in the first place. No one remembers having seen her. This creates a mood of distrust and paranoia.

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Ann desperately calls her brother Stephen for help. Ann and Stephen were raised without a father, and Ann never married the man who got her pregnant. She and Bunny have depended on Stephen to take care of them. Brother Stephen becomes enraged by the carelessness of the school’s staff, but Scotland Yard begins to investigate the matter. In walks, police superintendent Newhouse acted thoughtfully by Laurence Olivier assisted by Sergeant Andrews played by Clive Revill. Newhouse begins searching through the Lake’s belongings and the details of their lives trying to uncover what seems to be a mystery as to whether the child ever existed at all. He discovers that Ann once had an imaginary childhood daughter named Bunny, but even odder is that there seems to be no presence of Bunny’s belongings at the Lake’s residence.

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Little Bunny’s hair brush and comb are set out on the bathroom shelf…

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Where are Bunny’s things? A taste of female hysteria and maternal paranoia.
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Does the curious headmistress Ada Ford know more about Bunny’s disappearance than she’s telling or is she just one of the plot’s red herrings?
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Retired headmistress Ada Ford has a fantastical grasp of the inner workings of a child’s nightmares. Inhabited perfectly by the wonderful character actress Martita Hunt.

There are several red herrings that are inserted into the plot to divert us away from the truth. One such red herring involves retired headmistress, the eccentric Ada Ford played by the marvelous Martita Hunt who seems to have an odd sensibility about children and an acute understanding of childhood motivations which is quickly picked up on by the plasticine yet cold-blooded Stephen Lake. Yet another odd character in the mix is the lecherous landlord Horatio Wilson an aging writer and radio actor played by Noel Coward who revels in his African Fertility Masks and lets himself into the Lakes apartment at will, in a perpetual state of inebriation lurking about making lewd gestures and propositions to Ann. He also has a collection of whips, exhibiting signs of his sadomasochistic proclivities.

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Horatio Wilson (Noel Coward) is a peculiar sort… as he intrudes on Ann’s world.

All these strange characters give Inspector Newhouse a lot to digest, as he tries to eliminate all the possible suspects while trying to find a trace of Bunny that proves she actually does exist, not discounting the idea that Ann Lake is a delusional hysterical woman.

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Ann and Stephen tell Inspector Newhouse that Bunny’s passport and all her belongings have also gone missing, assumed stolen during the mysterious burglary in the apartment. Another odd detail that doesn’t support Ann’s truly having raised this missing child, is that the school’s authorities claim that they never received a tuition check for a Bunny Lake.

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Ann shows Stephen the voucher for the Doll Hospital where Bunny’s doll is being repaired. Proof that she exists? Traces of an incestuous bond from the bathtub…

Ann finally remembers that she has a ticket for the Doll Hospital where she took Bunny’s doll. She remembers this during a scene where Stephen is taking a bath, and brother and sister are both just smoking and talking like a married couple. The film constantly hints at traces of a very incestuous relationship, creepily manifested in several scenes, Stephen’s physical contact with Ann when he tries to comfort her, and one other such overt scene while Stephen is taking his bath…

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Ann runs out into the dark and ominous London nightlife to try and get the doll from the repair hospital so she can show the police that Bunny owned a doll, reasoning that this will prove she exists.

Ann at the doll hospital

Continue reading “Bunny Lake is Missing (1965) & Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964): Otto Preminger/Bryan Forbes -‘A Conspiracy of Madness’: Part 1”