LEMORA: A CHILD’S TALE OF THE SUPERNATURAL 1974
Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural 1974 is a nightmarish reverie pressed onto celluloid, a Gothic hymn sung from the wild, swampy margins of American horror cinema. Directed and written by Richard Blackburn (he co-wrote the acclaimed black comedy Eating Raoul 1982 however, Lemora remains his only feature film as director), who also steps into the role of the Reverend, the film is a strange and beautiful anomaly—an indie production shot on the outskirts of Pomona, California, but set in a shadow-haunted South during Prohibition, where the boundaries between innocence and corruption dissolve like mist at dawn. Lemora unfurls like a dark, whimsical dream—an adult fairytale spun from nightmare and moonlight, where innocence is both enchanted and endangered. Each shadowed corridor and haunted lullaby beckons us to move deeper into a phantasmagoria of longing and unearthly solemnity, weaving a spell that is as beguiling as it is unsettling.
At the story’s trembling heart is Lila Lee, played with ethereal fragility by Cheryl Smith. Lila is a “singing angel,” a 13-year-old church girl whose voice fills the pews and whose beauty is both her shield and her curse. Orphaned by violence—her gangster father, Alvin Lee (William Whitton), has vanished after a bloody act—Lila is raised by the Reverend, a man of conflicted virtue whose paternal care is shadowed by unspoken longing.
When a letter arrives from the mysterious Lemora (Lesley Gilb, billed as Lesley Taplin), summoning Lila to the dying bedside of her father in the remote town of Astaroth (a name that H.P. Lovecraft could have conjured from his fevered imagination), the girl’s journey begins—a pilgrimage that is also a descent, a fairy tale road spiraling into nightmare.
Cheryl Lynn “Rainbeaux” Smith was a luminous presence in 1970s cult and exploitation cinema, her screen persona a blend of innocence and melancholy that seemed to radiate both vulnerability and quiet strength. Born in Los Angeles in 1955, Smith was raised by a vaudeville dancer mother and a brick mason father, growing up just off the Sunset Strip—a setting that would shape her bohemian spirit and early immersion in the world of music and film. She left high school to pursue acting, making her debut in the award-winning short The Birth of Aphrodite before landing her first major role as the haunted Lila Lee in Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural, where her ethereal beauty and genuine fragility became the film’s emotional core.
Smith’s career blossomed quickly. She became a fixture of B-movies and cult classics, starring in films like Caged Heat (1974), The Swinging Cheerleaders (1974), Phantom of the Paradise (1974), Massacre at Central High (1976), and Laserblast (1978).
She also appeared in more mainstream fare, including Farewell, My Lovely (1975), and had a memorable turn as Cinderella in Michael Pataki’s 1977 adaptation. Her performances often carried an “enchanting quality of disconsolate beauty,” making her riveting to watch even in the most offbeat or low-budget productions.
Smith was also a musician, playing drums for several bands and briefly associating with the legendary girl group The Runaways. Her bohemian lifestyle and the Sunset Strip’s counterculture scene earned her the nickname “Rainbeaux,” a moniker she embraced throughout her career.
Tragically, Smith’s promising trajectory was derailed by heroin addiction in the late 1970s. Substance abuse led to legal troubles, time in prison, and declining health. Despite her struggles, she continued to work sporadically in film and music, contributing to soundtracks and even designing tattoos for fellow inmates during her incarcerations. Smith died in Los Angeles in 2002 at the age of 47. The cause of death was complications from hepatitis brought on by years of drug use. Her legacy endures in the cult film community, where her performances—especially in Lemora—are remembered for their haunting sincerity and the bittersweet aura of a talent lost too soon.
Byrd Holland’s makeup artistry in Lemora conjures a world where the flesh itself seems haunted. Faces are powdered to a deathly pallor, eyes ringed with shadows that whisper of sleepless centuries, and every wrinkle or wound is rendered with an almost painterly care. The vampires’ visages are both grotesque and mournful, their skin waxen and otherworldly, as if lit from within by the cold glow of the grave. Holland’s work transforms the cast into spectral figures adrift in a waking nightmare, each face a mask of beauty corrupted and innocence undone. Holland also worked on the cult film The Baby 1973 starring Hollywood’s earthy sex symbol Ruth Roman.
The film’s opening movements are bathed in the golden light of lost innocence, but as Lila boards a bus to Astaroth, the palette shifts: colors become bruised, shadows lengthen, and the world grows strange. The bus ride itself is a passage through a liminal realm, the driver (Hy Pyke) a cackling ferryman, the landscape outside dissolving into a twilight netherworld and spectral wasteland, that is the nocturnal swamp. When the bus is attacked by feral vampires—ghouls more beast than human—Lila is thrust into a world ruled by hunger and decay, rescued only by the enigmatic Lemora, whose beauty is as chilling as it is alluring.
Lemora’s domain is a surreal Gothic tableau: a crumbling mansion and stone cottage, inhabited by pallid, sickly children and the crone-like Solange (Maxine Ballantyne). Mirrors are absent, meat is served raw, and the air vibrates with the cries of unseen things. The cinematography by Robert Caramico is lush and impressionistic, draping every frame in velvet shadow and moonlit blue, while Dan Neufeld’s score—a tapestry of eerie flutes, claviers, and music box melodies—turns the soundtrack into a haunted lullaby.
Key scenes unfold with the logic of a nightmare: In the flickering gloom of the stone cottage, Lila finds herself locked away and cornered by Solange, the ancient crone whose presence is as chilling as the grave. With a cracked, sing-song voice, Solange circles the frightened girl, her gnarled fingers clutching a bowl of food, her eyes gleaming with a mad, knowing light. She mistakes Lila for another lost soul, Mary Jo, and begins to croon a twisted nursery rhyme—Old Lady All Skin and Bones—each verse a macabre lullaby that seems to summon the shadows closer. The air thickens with dread as Solange’s singsong taunt echoes off the stone, her movements weaving a spell of terror around Lila, who is left trembling in the center of this spectral nursery, haunted by the specter of all the children who have vanished before her.
Lila’s escape from her prison, crawling under the house like Alice into Wonderland’s underbelly; her first glimpse of Lemora feeding on a child, framed through a window as if peering into the forbidden; the macabre waltz in which Lemora twirls Lila among her “adopted” children, a dizzying dance of seduction and surrender. All these moments deepen the brooding magic of the film’s spell.
The film’s most indelible image may be the two factions of vampires at war: Lemora’s pale, aristocratic brood and the degenerate, animalistic ghouls who prowl the woods—a metaphor for the duality of desire and decay that pulses through the film’s veins.
As Lila uncovers the truth—and finally comes face to face with her father, who is a monster, Lemora the queen of vampires, and she herself the coveted prize in an ancient ceremony—the film becomes an allegory of lost innocence and the seductive pull of forbidden knowledge. The Reverend’s pursuit of Lila, his own faith tested and found wanting, ends in a final, chilling reversal: Lila, transformed, welcomes him with a kiss that is both sacrament and damnation, her fangs gleaming as he succumbs to his desires.
The performances are as stylized as the visuals: Smith’s Lila is a study in tremulous purity, her wide eyes reflecting both terror and awakening curiosity; Lesley Gilb’s Lemora is a statuesque, enigmatic predator, her affection for Lila tinged with both maternal tenderness and predatory hunger. Blackburn’s Reverend is a portrait of conflicted piety, his sermons echoing with the hypocrisy and repression that the film quietly skewers.
Lemora is a film of moods and metaphors, a southern Gothic fable that moves with the languor of a dream and the inevitability of a curse. Its low budget is transmuted by creativity into atmosphere: fog coils through the woods, shadows pool in corners, and the night is alive with the croak of frogs and the wail of the “old ones.” The look of the film is lush yet decayed, every frame a painting where innocence is stalked by corruption, and every sound a whisper from the dark.
To watch Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural is to wander through a labyrinth of childhood fears and adult desires, to be seduced by the promise of immortality and undone by the loss of innocence. It is a film that lingers, like a half-remembered nightmare or a hymn sung in a minor key—a cult classic whose beauty is inseparable from its dread, and whose tale of transformation is as old as the lurking shadows themselves.
