My Shudder Pick of the Month is the Gloriously Bonkers 1979 The Omen Knockoff The Visitor
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the site and career-sustaining column where I give YOU, the ferociously sexy, intimidatingly brilliant Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for each additional selection.
I take comfort in knowing that because I am just one man with a finite lifetime that’s already half over, I will NEVER have enough time to watch all of the great television shows and ridiculous movies.
Due to the nature of my brain and career, I’m more devoted to catching up on legendarily bonkers cult films than prestige television shows like The Sopranos, Deadwood, Mad Men, and Better Call Saul.
Why doesn’t television have anything analogous to bad movie culture? True, there are boob tube phenomena that have attracted a cult following of the so bad it’s a good variety, like the Star Wars Holiday Special, Rapsittie Street Kids Believe in Santa, and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, but they seem to be the exception that proves the rule.
It comes down to time. In order to experience Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip in its entirety, as I have, you need to watch twenty-three episodes of an hour-long television show you know, going in, is considered one of the most embarrassing of all time, if not necessarily the worst.
This helps explain why the Star Wars Holiday Special and Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park have outsized, enthusiastic, movie-style cults. It only takes two hours to suffer through the glorious madness of Star Wars and Kiss’ ill-fated forays into holiday specials and TV movie spectacle, respectively.
I can’t see every camp classic, but I sure can try. A patron was kind enough to commission a Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 side project where I write about a different Shudder selection every month. I’ve been using that to catch up on kooky camp fodder I’m curious about.
I’m talking about marvelous oddities like 1979’s The Visitor. If it is not the single craziest knock-off of The Exorcist/The Omen it’s certainly not for a lack of trying.
The kookiness kicks off with the inspired casting of John Huston as a benevolent space-seraph at war with Satan's forces.
Huston was an A-list writer and director but wonderfully undiscriminating as the rare character actor. On the commentary track for Myra Breckinridge, the director complains that Huston was trying to undermine him so that he could take over as director. That seemed delusional. A giant like Huston had better things to do with his time than direct a notorious debacle like that, things like (checks notes) acting in Myra Breckinridge.
Huston was equally suited to playing God and the Devil. He had a literally outsized presence. He didn’t just come off as an unusually confident, self-assured, and capable man; he had the essence of a minor deity.
The Visitor’s mythology is bonkers, kooky, and out there. It’s also distractingly similar to Scientology, albeit with a Judeo-Christian twist.
The Visitor inhabits a universe defined by the never-ending spiritual warfare between the forces of good and evil, God and Satan. It deviates from traditional Judaism and Christianity in its curious conviction that Satan ended up on this miserable rock we call Earth after getting his evil butt kicked by the big guy upstairs one too many times.
Yahweh killed the devil, but he lives on in the tortured, conflicted minds of humanity, as well as the many children he fathered before his untimely passing. Women like bad boys like Motley Crue frontman Vince Neil. Who could be badder than the literal epitome of evil?
Paige Conner is wonderfully bratty as Katy Collins, the daughter of the devil. The pig-tailed menace hurts people because it’s a fucking blast, and also, she has her father’s morals, or rather lack thereof.
The literal spawn of Satan broadcasts her evil and contempt for the rotting meat puppets called humanity. For her, murder, maiming, and torture are child’s play.
The fun starts when Katy is inexplicably yet wonderfully given a loaded gun as a birthday present. I know we Americans love guns, but that seems a little much. You should not start killing people until you have at least reached puberty.
Space Jesus!
This unusual gift backfires and just plain fires when Katy’s poor mom Barbara Collins (Joanne Nail) is shot and spends the rest of the film in a wheelchair.
Katy is in league with a suit-clad Satanic cabal that wants more hellspawn, so it pressures Barbara’s boyfriend Raymond Armstead (Lance Henrickson) into knocking her up in order to sire a male child who will then breed with his half-sister in order to bring about the resurrection of the devil.
It’s disconcerting seeing Henrickson play someone young and handsome. At least he’s playing someone evil.
The Visitor’s pint-sized emissary of evil loves fucking shit up. In one glorious set-piece, she’s ice-skating so fast and holding the hands of two grown men so tightly that when she lets go, they rocket through protective glass to their apparent deaths.
Yet Katy somehow manages to escape consequences such as imprisonment or institutionalization because she’d got her daddy the devil’s sinister powers but also because she’s a cute, rich little white girl, and they can get away with anything, up to and including cold-blooded murder.
Huston’s paternal papa tries to reach Katy because she’s still a little girl, so he consequently feels bad about potentially murdering her.
There is a wonderful scene where he shows up at Katy’s home and announces that he is the babysitter that a service sent. The understandably confused Raymond and Barbara say what we’re all thinking and explain that babysitters are generally young women, often high school or college students, not wizened old men.
The screenplay points out the gleeful absurdity of a powerful angel who appears to have lived several long, eventful lifetimes, trying to pass himself off as a babysitter to get close to Katy.
Yet it deliciously and ridiculously admonishes us to let go of cognitive dissonance and give into the movie’s marvelous madness.
The Visitor has a plot that makes less sense the more you think about it, which is remarkable considering that it initially does not appear to make any sense at all.
Yet if you give yourself over to The Visitor, its ostensible weaknesses become strengths. The Visitor is a film of deliberate excess whose mythology recalls both Scientology and The Apple. It’s a fever dream of a b-movie alive with energy and ideas.
I loved The Visitor's dreamy, artsy, hyper-stylized look and equally otherworldly, synth-heavy score. The perfectly cast Huston is joined by a battalion of famous names who had seen better days, including Mel Ferrer, Glenn Ford, Sam Peckinpah, and Shirley Winters.
I got exactly what I wanted from The Visitor. It is just as gloriously insane as I had hoped/expected. It owes its existence to the boom in supernatural kiddie horror that followed The Exorcist and The Omen’s zeitgeist-capturing success, yet it has a wild flavor and texture all its own.
I’m glad I was able to cross The Visitor off my long list of famously kooky cult movies to watch and write about. In 2013, the hipsters at Drafthouse Films acquired the film and exposed it to a new audience of bad movie aficionados.
So, if your problem with evil children horror movies is that they do not involve creatures from outer space, then The Visitor is for you!
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