I don't think there's a film that's ever had me feeling quite so conflicted as John Frankenheimer's 1979 eco-shocker Prophecy.*
I first took an interest in the film after reading John Kenneth Muir's Flashbak article, "The Movie Monsters of Summer 1979", in which he examines the film's status as an also-ran in the very same year that the world pissed itself to Ridley Scott's game-changing space horror Alien, the implication being that, had the two flicks' box office fortunes been reversed, then Prophecy, and not Alien, might have set the new template for creature-based scares to come. Instead, Scott's film is now widely-regarded as one of the most iconic entries into the horror canon, while Frankenheimer's film has fallen largely into obscurity, except among genre enthusiasts.
It seems serendipitous that the two films happened to go head to head within the same summer. Ostensibly, Scott and Frankenheimer's films have little in common beyond the rudimentary set-up of "scary monster picks off ignorant and unwary humans one by one". One takes place in deep space and deals with the trepidation that accompanied the early years of space exploration, as man gazed up at the stars and pondered what he might encounter if he were to expand his domain across the cosmos. The other takes place in the wilderness of Maine, and entails a threat of a more familiar nature, whose plight and the implications of which man has long ignored and taken for granted. The one-word titles do a nifty job of encapsulating both milieus. "Alien" is all about confronting the dark unknown, whereas the title "Prophecy" has an air of, "Well shit, we were warned." Both films have a distrust of technology and of corporations, Alien through the character of Ash and the company that declared the human crew expendable, and Prophecy through the paper mill whose irresponsible production practices are creating an environmental catastrophe, although Prophecy is more obviously a polemic than is Alien. Two distinctive films, and yet Muir identifies a fascinating parallel in terms of how the pictures were marketed. Both campaigns hyped up their central creatures by focusing squarely on their antenatal forms, the Alien campaign showing the now-infamous Xenomorph egg, and the Prophecy campaign charting its comparatively obscure beastie at various stages of embryonic development. Both campaigns were deliberately subdued and designed to give away as little as possible about the creature in question, prompting audiences to ponder just what kind of hideous monstrosities mankind would be up against in either case. Both carried a strong sense of impending doom - if the little, unformed monsters were this foreboding, then you sure as heck couldn't envy any character who found themselves facing off against the final adult forms.
But the focus on young, developing monsters has more going on than just the preservation of detail. The strikingly similar campaigns reveal a common preoccupation that ends up making the two pictures feel more alike than first meets the eye - that is, their shared and somewhat gruesome fascination with fertility and gestation. Both films may be leery of technology, but they convey an even greater suspicion of our own bodies and of the messy physical complications that enable the cycle of life to perpetuate. Alien and Prophecy both concern the reproductive process being in some way corrupted or inverted in order to appear monstrous, and the uneasy insinuation that the little spawn we're nurturing inside could well end up being the agents of our own destruction. Alien might deal with the fear of the unknown and Prophecy concerns about environmental damage, but I think it's fair to say that somewhere in all of that are anxieties about parenthood, not altogether dissimilar to those expressed by David Lynch a couple of years prior with Eraserhead. Eraserhead examines those fears from a strictly paternal perspective, of course - the hero did not have to carry that proto-E.T. in his body for nine months, nor did he have to go through the whole traumatic procedure of forcing it out. Alien and Prophecy, by contrast, each have a keen interest in turning the pregnancy process into the basis of their horror. In Alien, the arc of John Hurt's ill-fated character provides us with not-so-subtle analogies for impregnation, gestation and finally the punchline, in which Kane gives birth to his xeno offspring in a screaming, blood-soaked frenzy. In Prophecy, we start out with a character, Maggie (Talia Shire), who is already pregnant and reluctant to share the news with her environmentally-conscious husband Rob (Robert Foxworth), who has previously voiced reservations about bringing another human into a world with a staggering population problem. Already there is a tension established, with Maggie's pregnancy signifying both life renewing and life depleting, a paradox that can only become more tortuous as we move deeper in.
In his article, Muir sees little mystery in why the Alien campaign was able to generate more buzz and excitement among contemporary moviegoers; it was simply snappier. "In space, no one can hear you scream" still ranks as one of the most celebrated promotional taglines of all-time (within the horror genre, it's arguably rivaled by only The Fly, with the similarly concise "Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid"). Heck, I knew the tagline as a child, well in advance of my seeing the movie or even knowing where it came from. By contrast, Prophecy went for the wordier, "She Lives. Don't Move. Don't Breathe. There's Nowhere To Run. She Will Find You." It conveys effectively the same message - your primal human survival mechanisms are futile in the face of such formidable terror - but it's more of a mouthful and lacks the icy elegance of the Alien tagline. Both campaigns are clearly endeavoring to withhold as much information as possible about just what the heck the creatures in question actually are, and yet Alien has so much trust in its entirely minimalist approach that Prophecy, by contrast, appears to give away an awful lot. The above trailer for Prophecy seems talkative and rambling compared to Alien's much-admired teaser, in which we were shown nothing more than intersecting images of an egg and a barren landscape.
And yet, I won't lie. Alien might have had the slicker campaign, but if I had been around in 1979 and was attentive to such things then I suspect that I personally would have been way more hyped for Prophecy. At the very least, it's the campaign that strikes more of a chord with me now. I'll acknowledge that it could just as easily be that the Alien promotion is now so iconic and well-known that sheer familiarity has robbed it of all of its intrigue, whereas Prophecy, having remained such an obscurity all these years, offered something relatively new and mysterious. Confronted with that monstrous "she" as she gradually accumulates each one of her terrible features against an ominous black void, I found myself feeling equal measures intimidation and curiosity, which is precisely what an effective horror campaign should do - ideally, you should go in dreading exactly what you're going to encounter, while being pushed along by the insatiable urge that you HAVE TO KNOW what's out there. The trailer builds the momentum by simulating the sounds of a heartbeat throughout, once again creating a paradox between the development of new life and impending destruction; the heartbeat tells us that the creature lives, but could just as easily represent the fear of its prospective victims. I can only imagine the effect this would have had on me if I had seen it in a darkened auditorium as part of an actual theatrical package.
So, how is the movie itself?
Well, here's where it gets slightly awkward and we have to address the elephant in the room. Or the raccoon in the log cabin, as it were.
See, all the while that I was reading Muir's piece and my interest in Prophecy growing, my curiosity was tempered by the nagging suspicion that I had encountered this movie before in some other, less than palatable context. Some deeper gut feeling was warning me that I perhaps shouldn't get too close to this thing, not simply because Muir doesn't exactly talk the film up toward the end of his article, but because there was some finer detail about the film's production that I really wouldn't like. As it turned out, my gut was onto something. Remember this piece I wrote last year in appreciation of Harry, the Jekyll/Hyde dog who nearly made mincemeat of William Hurt's character in Eyewitness? There, I mentioned a Canadian documentary from the early 1980s, Cruel Camera, which examined Hollywood's sometimes troubling regard for the animals used in its productions, following on from recent controversies surrounding the treatment of horses on Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980). Harry was documented as a positive example of an animal working in the industry, a non-aggressive dog who'd been trained to simulate aggressive behaviour. For negative examples, they covered Heaven's Gate, Disney's infamous lemming massacre, and an incident from this very picture. Unfortunately, it appears that an animal was harmed in the making of Prophecy. There is a scene where Rob and Maggie, who have recently taken up residence in the wilderness for the purposes of the former's environmental research, are attacked in their cabin by a vicious, ostensibly rabid raccoon, which Rob fends off with a wooden panel and ultimately vanquishes by hurling into the fire place. For this sequence, it seems that Frankenheimer really did have Foxworth beat a raccoon with a wooden paddle (although the fireplace moment was thankfully simulated), and an American Humane Association officer had to intervene in order to put a stop to it. Here's what's reported of the incident on the American Humane Association's website. From this account, Frankenheimer doesn't come off at all well, although it seems that Foxworth was unhappy about the situation:
"A crew member called AHA's Hollywood office to report that a raccoon was in danger of being beaten to death for a scene. Humane Officer Gordon Jones raced to the studio and stopped the action. "The actor had had enough of hitting the raccoon, and he was trying to go easy and fake it, but the director was screaming for him to keep going and hit it harder," Jones said. He further added, "I asked them to stop, and they did. In the movie, the raccoon is thrown into a fire, but I made sure they used a dummy." Nonetheless, AHA rated the film Unacceptable for the animal abuse that occurred."
According to Cruel Camera, the scene in question was cut from the film's UK release by the British Board of Film Classification (then the British Board of Film Censors) due to excessive cruelty. The entry for the film on the official BBFC website would appear to back this up, indicating that the film was cut by eight seconds, although it does not go into the details. The only UK VHS release I have been able to get hold of is the pre-certificate version released by CIC, which includes the offending scene (prior to the 1984 Video Recordings Act, UK video releases were allowed to circumvent the regulations of the BBFC). I will say that from what's actually included in the original cut, we don't ever see the paddle make obviously violent or forceful contact with the raccoon. However, the screeching noises and cowering motions made by the raccoon throughout this sequence are deeply unpleasant - it sounds and acts exactly as to you expect an animal to when in a serious state of distress, and to know that that distress was genuine does really bother me. I don't even want to know how they got the raccoon to produce those harrowing convulsing movements right before it lunges at Rob.
The business with the raccoon is, unfortunately, a deal-breaker for me, and why I feel I cannot, in good conscience, recommend the film. To top it off, the sequence is fairly gratuitous in narrative terms. It's only very circumstantially connected to the central plot involving the creature on the poster, and the story could easily have functioned without it. It's basically there for the purposes of giving the viewer a sudden, early scare before we move into the deeper business with the critter that we all came here to see. Obviously, cruelty is cruelty regardless of whether or not it furthers the plot, but the overall superfluousness of it all merely adds to my list of frustrations regarding the high number of questionable decisions made throughout this production. It's a shame, because if not for the raccoon, I would probably be able to enjoy the film a lot more as a bit of schlocky B-movie fun, even if it doesn't exactly live up to the dizzying terror promised by its inspired promotional campaign. Frankenheimer's questionable production techniques aside, I'm compelled to rate Prophecy as a first-class example of a horror in which the promotional material is genuinely more arresting than the feature itself, in part because the central critter, when it finally shows its malformed face, bears little resemblance to the fetal monstrosity shown gestating in the trailer - which, to be honest, isn't exactly uncommon for a creature feature. I remember when a friend slipped me a copy of Larry Cohen's Q: The Winged Serpent, pointed at the sensational-looking dragon on the cover and said, "By the way, don't expect anything nearly as impressive as that in the film itself." He explained that all-too often, the poster art is the place to conceptualise the movie as it could have been, if only it weren't constrained by the technical and budgetary limitations of the production. (Note: I actually thought that Q: The Winged Serpent was well-done.)
What really vexes me about the slavering eco-nightmare at the centre of Prophecy, however, is that not only does it look like an entirely different species to the creature shown across the promotional imagery, it doesn't seem to accurately match up with how the characters within the film describe it. Be warned that I am here going to start getting into spoiler territory - the monster in question is affectionately dubbed by the locals as the "Katahdin", so-called because of its resemblance to a being from Native American lore, said to combine characteristics of every creature in existence. In actuality, the monster is a freak of nature, brought about when mercury contamination within the local water supply caused a bear fetus to undergo some spectacular mutations within the womb, pulling its bodily features in a host of different evolutionary directions. It has the physical form of an enormous grizzly bear, but it walks upright like a human, has webbed feet and gills like an aquatic creature and, as we are told multiple times by the characters within the film, has large, piercing eyes like a cat. Only, when we actually see the Katahdin, those cat-like peepers really don't come through; in fact, the creature looks less like an ungodly mishmash of various different species than it does a regular old bear with a grotesque collection of facial tumors. Not exactly a pretty sight, nor something you want to run into when you're camping out in the wilderness, but it means that the mystery and intrigue surrounding this formidable being is ultimately weighed down by an air of banality. Because really, it's just a big old ugly bear we're up against, and that's still scary, but it's scariness of a more familiar kind. It doesn't help that, by 1979, the psycho-bear pic was already fairly well-trodden ground, with Grizzly (1976) and Claws (1977) both hurling themselves onto the "nightmares of nature" bandwagon that had gotten rolling with the success of Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975).
The underwhelming execution is really too bad, because the basic concept of the Katahdin is a genuinely unnerving one - all of nature combining forces into a singular entity to unleash a terrible vengeance upon the humans who wronged it, including mankind itself. It seems important from a thematic standpoint that the Katahdin has human characteristics, as it signifies the next generation whose future has been stifled by the current generation's poor treatment of the planet's natural resources, an analogy that gets increasingly salient when Maggie's pregnancy intersects with the whole mercury-induced catastrophe. It's here that the film's most intriguing (and sadly underused) plot element comes into play, and Prophecy edges toward territory which Alien, by its very nature, was doggedly determined to avoid - that is, anything that might engender sympathy for its central beastie. In Alien, the invading xenomorph was simply a borderline-unknowable threat to be feared, and nothing more. Prophecy, on the other hand, forges more of an obvious parallel between the Katahdin and its prospective human victims, chiefly in the motherhood theme that, in the Alien franchise, would not be evoked prominently until the 1986 sequel Aliens. Keep in mind that the tagline for Prophecy makes a point of specifying that the monster in question is female, a detail that becomes significant in the latter half of the film, when we discover that the Katahdin is nursing a pair of equally malformed offspring. One youngster perishes in a river, while the other falls into the hands of Rob and his team, who intend to bring the creature back alive to civilisation as proof of the disastrous toll that human consumption is having on the local environs. The climax of the film involves the characters trying to make their way across the wilderness with the Katahdin hot on their trail, the implication being that the creature is compelled to pursue them so relentlessly because they've taken her baby. Thus, we see a paradox taking hold with regards to our perception of the Katahdin - she may be a mindless, merciless machine of destruction, but one cannot deny that she is one heck of a dedicated parent. Our protagonists likewise get a personal emotional stake in the ecological catastrophe, once Rob deduces that the Katahdin's existence was brought about through fetal abnormalities caused by mercury contamination within the local food chain, prompting Maggie to consider that she too has been living off a diet of fish sourced from the local river, and leading to the horrifying realisation that she might now be carrying a Katahdin of her very own. The purpose of this particular thread, obviously, is to illustrate how humankind's careless devastation of the very resources on which it depends will inevitably result in its own ruination. On a poetic level, it reinforces the culpability of man in this appalling equation, as his offspring, corrupted by his own wastefulness and indifference, now threaten to become reflections of what he essentially already is - that is, insatiable agents of wanton destruction. From an immediate narrative angle, it also takes Maggie's arc in a fascinating and somewhat unexpected direction, as her fears for the prospective monster gestating within her womb manifest as a kind of empathy for the Katahdin, with whom she now feels a common sense of fate.
Maggie's empathy is reflected in her nurturing attitude toward the abducted baby Katahdin, which she takes charge of and takes to carrying around in her arms as if she were cradling a human infant. Maggie seems painfully aware that she might be looking at her own future child in this pint-sized freak of nature, and seems prepared to accept that the future of nature and the human race alike could well be hideous mutations, as her maternal instinct overrides her revulsion. The sight of her cradling the young Katahdin is bizarre and yet entirely satisfying on an emotional gut level. Fact is, your heart truly bleeds for the twisted little monstrosity, it being so wretchedly helpless and pathetic, and I think it's fair to say that you end caring about the fate of the infant Katahdin more than you do any of the human participants, except possibly Maggie. It's an investing story thread, but sadly one that the movie itself ultimately doesn't know what to do with. The young Katahdin comes to an abrupt end when it bites Maggie in the neck and Rob proceeds to drown it, prompting the question as to why he went to such great lengths to keep it alive (incurring the wrath of the adult Katahdin) if he was willing to off it so casually. It could be a deliberate tactic on the part of the film, to caution us about the dangers of getting too romantic in our view of the natural world, but I very much doubt it. It comes across as bad writing more than anything. The film, simply put, is not interested in Maggie's pregnancy arc, or in her anxieties about parenthood, issues which feel as if they should be treated with far more dramatic importance. Not only does her relationship with her adopted baby receive no pay-off, but her dilemma regarding her own unborn monstrosity is left dangling, without resolution. Now that I think about it, I recall that The Fly did something very similar. I wonder why multiple monster movies from this era were so eager to tip-toe up to the well of the corrupted pregnancy but unwilling to actually dunk themselves into it.
The appearance of the young Katahdin does does raise an obvious question - if the Katahdin is reproducing, then just what the hell impregnated her? Where is Papa Bear in all of this? I remember thinking, "Oh god, that's how this movie's going to end, isn't it? He's going to show up at the last minute as our sequel hook." And what do you know? I was 100% right - in literally the last few seconds of the film, just as we're being lured into a false sense of security, the male Katahdin suddenly rears his head into view and roars, a moment I'll profess to finding unintentionally hilarious because of the striking resemblance he bears to Scuzzy Scavenger, a puppet character from the French-Canadian children's TV series The Adventures of Grady Greenspace. (Also, there was no sequel. The male Katahdin too is left dangling.)
It's because of the raccoon that I feel the need to ensure that whatever praise I'm compelled to extend to certain elements of Prophecy must be accompanied by a disclaimer. But even without it I suspect that I would still find myself getting endlessly frustrated with it, a film that simultaneously fascinates and repels me (inevitably, the term "love/hate relationship" raises its head). I think what mithers most me about Prophecy as a whole is that the potential was clearly there for this to have been a really great film, one which might even have devoured the mighty Alien for breakfast (although I suspect that Scott's film would always have done better at the box office regardless; it was the late 1970s, and the public's appetite for science fiction was high thanks to the success of Star Wars and Close Encounters of The Third Kind). The pieces are certainly all there. The central monster is conceptually very interesting and frightening, the ecological themes, while handled in an obviously schlocky manner, do have potency, and the character thread involving Talia Shire and her reluctant adoptee could have provided the basis for a powerful emotional catharsis, had the film only developed it further and had been prepared to settle for a less conventional ending. And many of the scenic shots around the Maine wilderness are stunningly beautiful. There was a truly masterful work of horror to be had out of Prophecy for certain, but we didn't quite get it in this particular timeline.
My Larry Cohen-loving friend was correct. Sometimes the promotional material just has to stand as its own work of art, and as a testament to what might have been.
* Apart from Twilight Zone: The Movie, of course. Due to the anthological nature of that film, however, it's easier for me to separate out what I like and don't like about that one.
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