The Unholy is a firmly engaging and frightfully commercial theological horror film. Its frights and demons unravel within a pop version of Christianity, which makes it no more unusual than last week’s Exorcist cash grab or last year’s installment of The Conjuring franchise. But, The Unholy actually works because it has a religious plot. It features a no-name actress called Cricket Brown Mark my words, she’s bound to go on to major things and plays a semi-violent deaf-mute vision of a young lady called Alice who sights and perceives a figure she assumes is Mary. After absorbing Mary’s spirit, Alice all of a sudden starts to hear and speak, she can also heal the sick which makes people from far places come to her quiet town of Banfield, Mass. The Unholy is based on a 1983 James Herbert novel which, written and directed by Evan Spiliotopoulos, could almost pass as a faith-based horror flick. We know that given the premise of the movie, it can’t be all sweetness and light, but what does matter is how solidly it believes in those things. That’s what fuels its dark side. Every horror movie pits good versus evil face-off in an alarming battle, but in this case, it truly is a holy war.
Another main character besides Alice is Jerry Fenn, played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan. He is a journalist who fell from grace and became a tabloid reporter. Fenn covers stories with a mix of critical skepticism, judgment, and sleazy but charming mid-life flair. Fenn is in Banfield to cover a fake sensational story. The sensational story revolves around cows being mutilated. However, he stays long enough to witness Alice, standing in front of a spindle dead tree, going into a trance. While she’s starting to heal people, Fenn is exasperated as he watches a young boy with muscular dystrophy walk away from his wheelchair. He knows he’s hit the jackpot.
Cricket Brown has a striking resemblance to a young Natalie Portman. With a calm, yet powerful, voice, her features quiver with life even in repose. The emotions surging around inside, it seems as if she’s possessed. For pregnant Joan of Arc, now a teenage televangelist in Alice’s form taking control of a swoon-worthy God, command is the name of the game. We plunge into the film because of the miracles that she’s channeling so fervently. It’s when she evokes the supreme force of Satan that the audience feels like they’re invading and daydreaming.
Evan Spiliotopoulos steps into directing for the first time with this feature after writing “Hercules” and “The Huntsman Winter’s War.” Though he effortlessly follows the tragic patterns of megaplex horror, he manages to engrave them with an extraordinary flow and straightforwardness. His tropes may seem typical, such as the flash cuts of evil, the whispers amidst the score, the hooded specter who keeps recurring to give us jumpscares like Slender Man and Candyman or a ghost from “Insidious 9 Please Don’t Go in the Attic Again.” But Spiliotopoulos does not bombard the crowd with supernatural visuals like he is throwing gruesome confetti. There is a beautiful restraint to the effects.
Having watched several horror movies, I realize that many of them employ the latest technological advancements to elicit gruesome jumps using spine-chilling mechanisms revealing the “boo” moment. The Unholy, for instance, had several moments where I had to ‘jump’. Nevertheless, the most astonishing element of the film’s resurrected demon is her metamorphosis into a true villain that drives her character to perform an evil ‘dance of the seven veils”. She is as stunningly possessed as the dark-haired phantom in ‘Ringu’. Moreover, she lacks fluidity in her movements and has an ominous herky-jerky-ness to her movements akin to the spider walk scene in the 2000 re-release of The Exorcist. Her cinematography is as vivid as that of Christian’s unfathomable nightmares. Stigmata (in this case, religious statues with elegant tears of blood), and the figure of Mary herself who in that cloak holds a black mask signifying her as a haunted marionette of death portray the vivid imagination of Christians.
Mary Elnor is not the Mary you are thinking about. She is, however, a woman from the 19th century who performed miracles, although, in her case, miracles meant channeling Satan instead of God. In 1845, she was ‘hung’ from a tree the dead one that drew Alice a mask nailed onto her face as an homage to the prologue in Mario Bava’s “Black Sunday”, and burned alive. Now, a footprint of the devil disguised as the ‘Holy Mary’ comes back, and through Alice, who thinks her visions are for the greater good of the world, she manipulates claiming to work ‘through’ her.
As sad as it may be, William Sadler, the actor, portrays the father Hagan character that passes on the infamous quote “Where God builds a church, the devil builds a chapel.” Cary Elwes, a wonderful actor, takes on the Bishop Gyre role in Boston. Cary did not have the accent down pat which worked to his advantage since Shoddy Boston is a religious politician’s accent. These are two extreme examples of character portrayal within the same movie. South Bostonians sanitary the church at Banfield, escalated as he turned it into a holy shrine a la Lourdes and Fatima. You can almost feel the ominous vibes grow as a crowd forms to watch him in a tent show scheduled for mid-Yesu’s, turning an ordinary mass into a theatrical celebration. Elwes describes this perfectly. The book didn’t take much of a shovel when writing the religious horror but in contrast to other posers, “The Unholy” uses a skeleton of faith that most modern horror stories are missing.
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