TALES OF LOHR: "THE SUDBURY DEVIL"
Thoughts on the new folk horror from Atun-Shei Films; plus, "Factory Roll Call" calls in Paul
Among the YouTube-based creators working in the revisionist history niche, New Orleans-based filmmaker /performer Andrew Rakich stands out. His channel, Atun-Shei Films, has combined Rakich’s cinematic skills and deep historical knowledge with a healthy satirical streak to present unique videos that tackle some of the most regrettably enduring apocrypha (and complete lies) that make up what we know as the Great American Narrative. Cornerstones of Atun-Shei’s output include the absurdist noir send-up Frozen ‘50s Man, in which a cryogenically dethawed private dick takes on contemporary crime and his own backwards alpha-male attitudes; the title-says-it-all odd-couple sitcom spoof My Nazi Roommate; and the masterful Checkmate, Lincolnites!, in which a split-screened Rakich, playing both sides of a Billy Yank / Johnny Reb debate, debunks the increasingly bankrupt defenses of Confederate Lost Cause mythology. (Rakich draws heavily for this Atun-Shei series on his own background as a living historian at Gettysburg National Military Park.)
Despite his present Southern provenance, Rakich is a native of New England, and some of his material naturally engages with the fraught history of the earliest days of English colonization of the New World. The Atun-Shei series Witchfinder General features Rakich discussing modern culture in full physical and ideological character as a harsh patrician colonial law enforcer, and the filmmaker has also crafted deep-dish video studies of one of the most disgraceful chapters of early New England history, King Philip’s War, a short but shockingly brutal conflict between white settlers and indigenous peoples that wiped out no fewer than a dozen colonial towns, destroyed the economic fortunes of countless survivors, and left the Wampanoag people rootless refugees on land that had one been their own.
The last major Native victory of King Philip’s War was claimed in what is now Sudbury, Massachusetts, and Rakich has drawn on the psychic and physical fallout of this conflict as the backdrop for his first feature-length horror film, The Sudbury Devil. Shot on authentic woodland locations in New England, with financial backing from an Indiegogo campaign, this is a film that makes up for any of its potential budgetary shortcomings with the fierce commitment of an all-in cast and Rakich’s own serious-minded devotion to dramatizing how the sins of the past have redounded through the ages in both our own imperiled present-day circumstances, and in the stories we tell one another in order to attempt to make sense of the terrors that beset us. Comparisons to Robert Eggers’ 2016 genre masterpiece The Witch are all but inevitable, given the shared general milieux in which the films operate, but Rakich proves more willing to explicitly seek his inspiration in both the duskier pages of the historical record and the grislier back shelves of the old-school grindhouse video outlet.
The Sudbury Devil is set an unspecified number of years after the King Philip conflict, but the survivors of that clash still bear all manner of scars. It has left stolid witch hunter John Fletcher (Benton Guinness) missing an eye, and when he and his clerical colleague Josiah Cutting (Josh Popa) are called to Sudbury to investigate mysterious doings in the surrounding forests, their chief contact, fellow former fighter Isaac Goodenow (Matthew Van Gessel), is himself short an arm due to the violence. But Goodenow seems equally shaken in his soul by what he has recently witnessed in a clearing near Sudbury, and when Fletcher and Cutting follow the disturbed settler into the trees to investigate, they soon find themselves sucked into a seething assault of twisted sexual depravity, searing sourceless light piercing the shadows, swirling psychedelic intrusions disrupting the skies, and harbingers of an evil threatening to pierce the veil between hell and the deserving-of-damnation remnants of the King Philip’s army. Presiding over this havoc is Patience Gavett (Linnea Gregg), a Native-descended widow woman who has seemingly fallen under a devilish spell, and has likewise drawn both Goodenow and Flora (Kendra Unique), a tormented slave woman, into the satanic snare.
Rakich’s actors bring a studiously straight-faced approach to material that, in less astute hands, might have easily collapsed into a campy stew. Guinness and Popa provide a sense of gravity for the increasingly insane action surrounding them, the former particularly powerful as his grounded perspective comes under assault by the supernatural. As these eldritch pressures also bear down ever harder on Goodenow, Van Gessel’s already haunted performance gives way to masterfully deployed tics, twitches, and a disturbing brace of increasingly uncontrollable noises, handled by the actor with a force that is impressive to behold. Gregg’s piercing dark eyes and deceptively compact frame belie the imperious might with which she commands the screen; one finds it easy to believe so many otherwise God-fearing souls falling under her sway.
Given my understanding of Rakich’s self-professed progressive political leanings, I was admittedly put out by Unique’s early scenes, in which she embodies a slavering, hyper-sexualized thing all too redolent of the most extreme present-day conservative perceptions of any strong Black woman expressing cultural or sexual agency. (Flora, at first, is basically what Ben Shapiro sees every time he looks at a Megan Thee Stallion video.) But Rakich deftly subverts these stereotypes with mournfully allusive flashbacks to a heinous act Flora has been coerced into, transforming the character from a potential ideological minefield into a bracing meditation, abetted by Unique’s own cranked-to-eleven talents, on the psychological torment Black Americans are far too frequently driven to, almost as a matter of course, by American life itself. Rakich further challenges his actors by having them deliver their dialogue in the early modern English idiom known as Original Pronunciation, conferring an additional level of authenticity to the proceedings (Unique, Van Gessel, and Rakich himself, in a small but pivotal late-in-the-film appearance as a mysterious Sudbury denizen, prove especially skilled at handling this dialect’s demands).
Rakich’s crew likewise beautifully shoulder the duties of quick-and-dirty indie feature filmmaking to deliver a skillfully crafted and presented piece. Eduardo Urueña’s cinematography is surprisingly lush and mysterious, with a few striking sequences seemingly illuminated entirely by firelight. Rakich serves as his own editor here, with a strong sense of both the proper duration for an upsettingly long level of eye contact and how to crash together cryptically disturbing images to create a convincing sense of collapse into sheer stress-driven insanity. The project’s high-caliber sheen is both reinforced and delightfully grunged up by the deployment of some seriously gruesome makeup effects courtesy of Kahlyn Barnes (fair warning: If you’re easily upset by genital trauma, this is not going to be entering your "Most Rewatched” queue). The most elevated plaudits here belong to composer Dillon M. DeRosa, whose superlative score combines subtle, brooding strings with folk-tinged vocal effects and appropriately doomstruck interludes of chaos to place the characters on a truly darkling sonic plain from which there is no easy escape.
A film like The Sudbury Devil is never going to be to the taste of every filmgoer. Casual horror film fans, accustomed to the more domesticated scares of the Conjuring and Insidious franchises, will be put off by this film’s genuinely disquieting displays of sexual entrapment and graphic violence. Still others, only in it for the sliced-up flesh, might not want to do the encouraged spadework of familiarizing themselves with the historical background that helps give this film its full affective heft. But as someone, like Rakich, with a healthy appreciation of both historical narrative and horror filmmaking, I found much to admire in The Sudbury Devil. Here’s hoping Atun-Shei Films soon turns its creative attentions towards other ignominies of the grand epic of America. There are all sorts of demons buried beneath those monuments, just waiting for their day in the shadow-cursed sun.
The Sudbury Devil screened, on Sunday, September 17, in a one-time-only livestream sponsored by the Satanic Temple of Salem, Mass., who likewise hosted the film’s world premiere on Saturday 9/9. The film is currently being presented in special screenings throughout the country; its next event is this Saturday, Sept. 23, at the Guild Cinema in Albuquerque, NM. For information on upcoming Sudbury Devil screenings, visit their website at https://www.atunsheifilms.com/.
FACTORY ROLL CALL
PAUL MORRISSEY (1938 - )
There’s one, they say, in every crowd, and in Andy Warhol’s crowd, that one was Paul Morrissey. Amidst the drug-influenced, sexually exploratory, barrier-shattering denizens of the Factory scene, Morrissey stood out for his anti-drug attitudes, political conservatism, and moralistic perspective on much of what was going on in the very creative and social circle in which he had found himself immersed. But despite his public stance as an opponent of much of what Andy Warhol, as an artist and individual, seemed to stand for, Paul Morrissey would become a critical creative influence on the final major iteration of Andy Warhol’s cinematic output, and was at least partially responsible for a few revolutionary developments in the history of onscreen representation of the LGBTQ+ community.
A native of New York City, the openly Catholic Morrissey attended Fordham University and later served in the U.S. Army. After his time in the service, he began to experiment with avant-garde filmmaking and also ran a storefront theater called Exit Film in the Bowery. His first encounter with an Andy Warhol film was a 1963 screening of Sleep; he stayed for only a few hours of the 5 1/2 hour film, and didn’t see another Warhol film for eighteen months. In 1965, at a screening presented by Jonas Mekas’ Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, Morrissey was introduced to Warhol by the artist’s assistant Gerard Malanga (both Warhol and Morrissey had films showing at the event), and soon after he began to visit the Factory on a regular basis. His clear facility with the technical demands of filmmaking soon found him a role in an increasingly broad range of Warhol’s creative projects. He designed many of the lighting effects that surrounded The Velvet Underground during their Exploding Plastic Inevitable performances, and he is often credited with the groundbreaking (for Warhol) decision to pan the camera to the beach in 1965’s pansexual two-reeler rondelet My Hustler. Soon, the ever more valuable Morrissey was receiving “executive producer” credits on such late-’60s Warhol films as Lonesome Cowboys and The Loves of Ondine.
Morrissey has never been shy about asserting his own influence over the creative direction of Warhol’s films as the decade drew to a close, and following Warhol’s June 1968 shooting by Valerie Solanas and subsequent hospitalization, Morrissey took the opportunity to spearhead a project of his own under the Warhol Films imprimatur, writing, directing, and photographing the feature film Flesh. Following Warhol’s release from the hospital, Morrissey retained his pivotal creative position in the Warhol Films output going forward. With Warhol serving as “presenter” and occasional cameraman, Morrissey drove the production of a series of films that both homaged and satirized his own love of classic Hollywood melodrama, romance, and screwball comedy, retaining the earlier films’ downtown edge but offering a more polished, “professional” package than the truly underground previous aesthetic.
Morrissey’s productions spotlighted a new generation of Warhol superstars, such as the kabuki-faced fashionista Jane Forth, who assumed the co-lead in the poorly received Parisian light comedy L’Amour (1972). Almost all of Morrissey’s films with Warhol, including Flesh, Trash (1970), Heat (1971), and the Italian-shot 1973 horror-travesty twofer of Blood for Dracula and Flesh for Frankenstein, showcased Morrissey’s muse, the hard-faced, pansexually daring physique icon Joe Dallesandro. Morrissey also made extensive use of a trio of transgender performers, making them even more of a constant in his filmography than such presences had been in Warhol’s pre-Morrissey cinema. Candy Darling and Jackie Curtis dominate the proceedings in the manic Second Wave feminism burlesque Women in Revolt (1971), and Holly Woodlawn’s ferocious turn as Dallesandro’s partner in Trash was so startling that no less a Hollywood eminence than director George Cukor urged the Academy to confer upon Woodlawn a Best Actress Oscar nomination. Morrissey’s film is believed to be the first American feature to depict a transgender woman in romantic partnership with a cisgender male performer.
Despite his revolutionary casting and storytelling transgressions, Morrissey remained a conservative at heart. He was always willing to call out what he perceived as wasteful or anti-narrative excesses in Warhol’s art and cinema; he famously branded anyone who said Empire was Warhol’s best film a snob. This eventually led Morrissey to break from Warhol and strike out on his own as a filmmaker. His post-Warholian works include the 1978 Sherlock Holmes parody The Hound of the Baskervilles, starring Dudley Moore and Peter Cook; the drug-war action drama Mixed Blood (1984), featuring an early film appearance for John Leguizamo; and 1988’s urban dramedy Spike of Bensonhurst, featuring Oscar winner Ernest Borgnine and Sylvia Miles, who memorably starred opposite Dallesandro in Morrissey’s Heat.
Morrissey has not helmed a feature film since Spike, but he is still doing his thing, regularly lecturing and presenting retrospectives of his work, all the while proclaiming the primacy of classic Hollywood and its values, while doing his best to reclaim his creative mantle from the overwhelming influence of the name above the title. Maurice Yacowar, the dean of the fine arts faculty at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, has written arguably the definitive survey of Morrissey’s oeuvre, 1993’s The Films of Paul Morrissey.
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