Reviews
‘Alice, Sweet Alice’: Unmasking the Protoslasher From New Jersey
New Jersey was once the frontier of movie-making. The invention of the first movie viewer and movie camera originated from the East Coast, not Hollywood, which would later become the hub of filmmaking after World War II. In those early days, films like The Great Train Robbery brought name recognition to the state before the industry shifted west. Then, in 1976, a little Alfred Sole feature named Alice, Sweet Alice (originally titled Communion in the U.S.) was shot entirely in N.J. – the first major motion picture since 1933, according to a premiere report in the Daily News. It’s a bloody, perplexing mystery that has tangled audiences for decades. It has since become a cult classic, starring Brooke Shields in her film debut.
New Jersey Setting Enhances Horror in Alice, Sweet Alice
The location of Paterson, New Jersey, supplies the film with a gritty texture. Made on a budget of just $350,000, according to the director himself, as stated in a Blu-ray commentary released by Arrow Films in 2019, the film takes a sacrilegious perspective on religion and faith. The chapel of Paterson General Hospital served as the playground for much of the film’s most graphic, disturbing moments, particularly the first killing, which takes place just outside the sanctuary in the transept. A young girl is beaten, choked, and subsequently set on fire, her body shoved inside a delicately decorated coffer.
The profane nature of the killing, inside a church’s most sacred walls, sets the tone of irreverent murder. The seeming godlessness and lost innocence fuel the masked killer, dressed up in a doll-like party mask and yellow raincoat. In biblical terms, the color yellow often symbolizes God’s glowing presence, and can also signal glory and divinity. In donning such a bright color, the killer draws attention and makes an indelible impression on the victim. It’s a color you won’t soon forget. It also testifies to childlike guiltlessness and play-pretend. It’s often a shield to the elements, perhaps hinting at the killer’s resilience against human nature and their darker instincts.
Sibling Rivalry and Psychological Depth in Alice, Sweet Alice
12-year-old Alice (Paula Sheppard) frequently torments her younger sister Karen (Shields). Alice steals Karen’s playthings and communion veil as acts of rebellion and desperation. Their mother Catherine (Linda Miller) dotes upon Karen, showering her with kisses, hugs, and gifts, but often holds Alice at an arm’s length. A sick disdain for her eldest is practically sacrilegious. Alice is even deterred from taking communion, even by Father Tom (Rudolph Willrich), whose equally favorable attentiveness toward Karen is evident. Such glowing adoration positions Karen as the chosen child, while Alice seems to be primed to be a killer, owing to her disturbing tricks and seething jealousy of her sister. That bitterness pools in her eyes, perfectly hoodwinking the audience into believing she could be the killer.
When Catherine’s disagreeable sister Annie (Jane Lowry) is viciously attacked on the stairs, she crawls out onto the front stoop, the rain streaking the blood in her wake. Her nasty behavior toward Alice gets a fair exchange for her injuries. In the hospital room, religious iconography is displayed throughout, with photos, crosses, and various biblical scenes on the walls and tables. She still insists Alice is the culprit, vengeance burning in her eyes. Such lying all but seals her fate, as the killer remains on the loose. Their devious, bloodthirsty schemes soon lead Alice’s father, Dom (Niles McMaster), to believe that Angela (Kathy Rich), Annie’s reprimanded daughter, is the killer, who lures Dom out to a secluded warehouse.
The Killer’s Motives: Religious Extremism and Guilt
On a brilliant day, the killer unmasks themselves as they bind Dom up in rope and roll his body towards the second-floor window. “God wants you punished,” they froth at the mouth. The wickedness shimmers in their eyes, their teeth grating together. “Thrust into hell, Satan and the other evil spirits who rob this earth, seeking the ridden of souls!” The killer intends to teach perceived sinners of their immorality, but they remain still racked with guilt, even attending confession to make atonement for their iniquities. But their body trembles with pure sin, the most disgusting there could be. “Children pay for the sins of their parents,” they say through the layered partition separating them from the priest.
As we’ve seen throughout time and history, religious extremism pollutes the Bible’s teachings. Devout believers taint scripture about compassion and Jesus’ true way by picking and choosing verses that fit their social and political agendas. Or perhaps adhere to the straight, white, and male version of interpretations that occurred in 1946 by a panel of scholars.
Climactic Communion Scene and Tragic Finale
The killer in Alice, Sweet Alice feels directly ripped from that blasphemous playbook – opting for carnal destruction rather than absolution and redemption. In the final few moments, during communion, the killer kneels upon the altar and readies to accept their portion of bread and wine. But Father Tom stops the proceeding and attempts to convince the killer to come with him quietly, while the police wait at the front door. Tragedy befalls even the most pious. Blood squirts from the killer’s butcher’s knife, and Father Tom’s eyes roll in the back of his head. He’s deader than dead, his lifeless body thumping to the floor.
Alfred Sole’s feature film remains one of the most essential slasher prototypes. Coming two years before John Carpenter’s Halloween, it finetuned much of what we know and appreciate about the subgenre. From the masked killer to the blood-dripping kill sequences, Alice, Sweet Alice would not have reached cult classic status as it has. Without its double-edged godlessness and thematic defiance, its irreverence for faith in both the script and visual storytelling cues, from iconography to the killer’s motives, wouldn’t quite stun the audience into submission.
A landmark New Jersey film, Alice, Sweet Alice, still remains an essential horror film in the broader cinematic history to this day. Its scrappy, lo-fi technique makes it a surefire dose of murder and mayhem. There’s nothing else quite like it.
A24 never stopped pumping out banger horror movies. Let’s get that out of the way, straight away. Even its commercial and critical flops, like Opus or Y2K, still took a lot of really original swings, even if it hasn’t been a string of masterpieces like in their horror heyday of the late 2010s and early 2020s. Still, they may have made their scariest yet with Undertone, in a return to A24’s original MO of pure indie filmmaking.
A Single Location Horror Film Powered by Sound
Undertone is not a perfect movie, with an occasional off story beat, and the ending just missing the mark of perfection, but it is a tried-and-true testament to the power of storytelling. With essentially one active, on-screen actress and a single location, the film manages to create a sensory hellscape with immersive nightmare-inducing audio that has both story and scares derived entirely from a podcast. It is a sensory overload of pure terror, one that feels deeply sinister in its pitch-black story, one that demands to be seen in the darkest possible movie theater.
A24’s Undertone: A True Crime Podcast Turns Supernatural
The story is pretty straightforward…at least at first. It follows a true crime/horror podcast host (Nina Kiry), who lives by herself as she takes care of her dying, elderly, and borderline vegetative mother. Her co-host (Adam DiMarco, who is never fully seen) is sent a series of ten mysterious audio files from an unknown address, presumably sent for her to listen to on the show. As they begin to record their latest episode with live reactions to the files, reality slips further as she and her co-host fall into supernatural delirium. Strange noises, slipping time, and other haunted house trimmings all come out to play, each elevated by (as mentioned) horrific sound design and an even more horrific backstory.
Nursery Rhyme Origins and Deeply Disturbing Mythology
The story is about 95% airtight. Without getting too deep into spoilers, the origins of these files and their meaning are deeply fascinating, with some elements and angles involving the origins of nursery rhymes that are very, genuinely disturbing. There is one twist in particular that explores what one of the sounds truly means, which is highly upsetting once pieced together.
That being said, Undertone has some familiar tropes, and while the movie mostly touches upon certain unexplored mythology, certain scenes can feel a little too familiar to other recent demon movies like Shelby Oaks. The true meanings are a lot more creative, but it could have played around with its mythos to create a truly original villain.
Undertone’s Ambiguous Ending Demands a Rewatch
Similarly, the ending is almost perfect. There is a final twist about something the protagonist might have done that is a little confusing, and reframes the context of the film. It is highly interesting, however, and opens up several cans of worms of what this movie has to say about children, motherhood, and parenthood as a whole, as well as posing questions about the movie’s setting and timeline. It is always better to remain vague in horror, which this movie definitely does, but just a slight retweak of its final act could give the audience just the tiniest more understanding, without it going into full, mainstream territory. The film definitely requires a second watch, and in the best way possible.
A Groundbreaking Podcast Horror Experience
In a nutshell, the film’s methods of storytelling are groundbreaking. This movie is not a podcast, but all of its scares and stories are delivered to us like it is one. It feels like the birth of a new medium or style of movie, a perfect blend of audio and visual, with emphasis on the audio.
Additionally, with the story being literally told to us as if we’re listening to the characters’ podcast itself, it is a nightmare rabbit hole.
Like many people born in the mid-90s, the Sci-Fi Channel was one of my first introductions to horror. Whether it was random films playing or Sci-Fi’s 31 Days of Halloween, this channel was one of the main channels in my household. For the month of March, we’re going to take a look at Sci-Fi Originals (and maybe I cheated a bit and picked films that had their premiere on Sci-Fi). Picking films for this month was no easy task. Did I want to cover one of the plethora of amalgamated mega-animals fighting each other? Or what about shark tornadoes? One of the films I picked, after finding it too difficult to find Children of the Corn (2009) on streaming services, was an odd alien film I had never even heard of. That film is Silent Warnings.
What is Silent Warnings About?
Layne Vossimer (A.J. Buckley), his girlfriend Macy (Callie De Fabry), and a group of their friends head to Layne’s cousin’s house, Joe (Stephen Baldwin), after his mysterious death. Once there, they find the house in disgusting disarray. The friends decide to help Layne clean it up in order to put it on the market. But things quickly go south when they find a series of VHS tapes Joe left behind in the attic. What’s revealed in those tapes shows something that’s out of this world. Can Layne, his friends, and Sheriff Bill Willingham (Billy Zane) fend off these otherworldly invaders before it’s too late?
Conspiracy Theories, Mental Health, and Paranoia in Silent Warnings
As stated, this film was a late pick as I could not find 2009’s Children of the Corn streaming anywhere. Boy, am I glad I picked this. Silent Warnings has its fair share of issues. But it makes up for them in so many ways. This film is a very sober look into conspiracy theories, mental health, and the lengths that people go to when it comes to perceived threats. We get very little Stephen Baldwin, but what we do get is more than enough. He’s a recluse who lives on his 40-ish-acre property that’s been alien-proofed. His best friend (cousin?) is a scarecrow that has an AK-47. And he constantly records incoherent ramblings with his camcorder. Baldwin absolutely kills in his limited screentime. It’s like Stanislavski said, there are no small parts, only small actors.
Small-Town Horror and UFO Lore in Porterville
The quaint town of Porterville acts as the perfect backdrop for a story like this: a sleepy, nowhere town, where most people know each other. A town where the big call of the day for the Sheriff is about a missing dog. It’s the perfect setup for a story like this. It even mirrors many of the towns mentioned in Silent Invasion: The Pennsylvania UFO-Bigfoot Casebook. Much of this film’s atmosphere, the crop circles, acres of corn, and the disintegrating house, create a condensed world that adds so much claustrophobia to the film’s soul.
Acting, Dialogue, and the Problem with Early 2000s CGI Aliens
That being said, there are quite a few issues. Mainly, the acting. Besides Kim Onasch, Michelle Borth, Billy Zane, and A.J. Buckley (mostly), much of this film’s acting feels very Sci-Fi Original. It doesn’t help that the film’s dialogue, from writers Bill Lundy, Christian McIntire, and Kevin Gendreau, is just plain boring. And that’s not even mentioning how awful the CGI aliens look. A 2003 film about aliens, when only two or three are shown on screen, should be fully practical. And the fact that they use digital aliens takes away much of the film’s punch.
Why Silent Warnings Is an Underrated Sci-Fi Original
Silent Warnings doesn’t break much ground when it comes to the topic of aliens/Ufology, but it’s damn entertaining. But that’s the thing. Films don’t necessarily need to break new ground. I appreciate the swings this film takes, whether they hit or miss. There’s a wonderful setup with Stephen Baldwin, and the slow build to an exciting finale makes it all worth the wait. For a Sci-Fi Original, Silent Warnings has worked its way into my heart.
The Horror Press Podcast Episode 57: Backrooms & Jigglyspot
‘Undertone’ Review: A24’s Scariest Since ‘Hereditary’
‘Silent Warnings’ (2003) Review: An Unknown UFO Gem
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