Editorials
[Scream! Sunday] ‘The Sentinel’ Remastered and Reborn
I first discovered The Sentinel as a teenager before I had seen anything like The Beyond or other 70s occult films. I fell in love with it’s curious cast and unnerving psychosexual atmosphere intertwined with Catholicism. When I found out Scream! Factory was releasing it felt that same excitement all over again.
The Movie:
The Sentinel follows Alison Parker (Christina Raines), and up and coming actress who’s tired of doing commercials and feeling smothered. As an attempt to get some sort of freedom to figure herself out, she decides to move out of her boyfriend Michael’s (Chris Sarandon) apartment and into her own. Michael is skeptical, he wants to marry Alison and despite her desire to move out they still are deeply in love. Finally, she finds a beautiful historic building with an opening for only $400 a month and jumps on it. Just one catch, though, the building hides a portal to hell that is guarded by a mysterious old man who is protected by the Vatican.
Once moved in, Alison begins to meet her neighbors starting with Burgess Meredith as Charles Chazen who carries around various animals and insists upon inviting Alison to his cat’s birthday party, which I imagine wouldn’t actually be all that weird today. Her other neighbors aren’t quite as friendly. In one scene, she is invited in by two strange sister/friends who proceed to masturbate in front of her. We soon realize the priest on the top floor is not long for the world and only Alison can replace him, against her will of course.
The Sentinel is an unsettling film that, for its time, was pretty radical. Grotesque orgy scenes and incredible makeup effects from Dick Smith pack a punch that still stays eerie even in today’s market. Each scene focusing on the crazy neighbors leave me wanting more from their history. Given we are in the middle of a horror TV boom, I’d love to see a prequel done in a serialized form letting us in on the neighbors’ past lives and even other Sentinels.
The Tech Specs:
Scream! Factory’s transfer looks great as is the sound. There are several interesting commentaries including one with Christina Raines as well as two featuring the writers, producer, and director.
The rest of the special features are somewhat lackluster, we get the original trailer, some black and white stills, and an admittedly boring interview with Assistant director Ralph S. Singleton.
Final Thoughts:
The Sentinel is often overlooked when it comes to both the apartment horror and occult sub-genres, which is why I’m incredibly happy Scream! took the care to fix it up and re-introduce it. Whether you’ve seen it or not, especially if you haven’t, I highly recommend picking your copy up now.
And I should also mention, this flick has the widest array of actors featured. Jeff Goldblum, Christopher Walken, Jerry Orbach, Burgess Meredith, William Hickey, John Carridine, Beverly D’Angleo, and Ava Gardner just to name some.
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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