I attribute to some degree my, some might say, obsessive relationship to the horror genre to a hunt of sorts that l've been on since I was a small child. At some point in the early 80s, I would probably put myself in the four to seven age range, I encountered two horror movies on TV. I didn't see either of them in its entirety. I remember scenes from both. And I've been trying to find the films they belong to ever since. And I don't know if you know this, but there isn't a search category on IMDb called “vague and foggy images I have from my childhood.” So I think I've been consuming horror content ever since in a heretofore fruitless hunt for two movies with scenes that I may or may not remember from 40 years ago, but I haven't given up hope. I really want to get Grady Hendrix to come on and maybe help me finally figure out the answer to this sort of nagging unanswered question. But until that time comes, I keep looking.

And it was in the service of, once again, perhaps finding the answer, that I first saw The Mephisto Waltz. And I think I also always conflated The Mephisto Waltz with Mephisto, the 1981 Oscar-winning Hungarian film about a stage actor against the Third Reich. But it also has a really disturbing poster and great box art, and for some reason, I thought, I don't know, maybe it was one single story about opera and Satanism, I don't know. Anyway, I remember reading a synopsis of what turned out to be The Mephisto Waltz. I remember things about it like witchcraft and spell books and a married couple, maybe in California. I thought, You know, it's my duty to watch The Mephisto Waltz.

In the 1970s, the occult was all the rage and was making boffo box office bucks. And at the top of the heap, we have things like The Exorcist in 1973, The Omen in 1976, The Amityville Horror in 1979. We've got Suspiria in ‘77, The Sentinel. The Wicker Man, and The Blood on Satan's Claw. And then there are scores of others of varying degrees of quality: The Devil's Reign or The Brotherhood of Satan or To the Devil a Daughter. The Devil Within Her, I believe, featured Joan Collins and a dwarf, in not her finest moments. And of course we've also seen things like soul-switching from Walt Disney's Freaky Friday to the 2020 horror film Freaky with Vince Vaughn.

The Mephisto Waltz is probably the first genre picture to deal with the idea of the supernatural body swap, but it certainly wasn't the last. Case in point, the excellent The Skeleton Key from 2005 with Gena Rowlands, Kate Hudson, John Hurt, and Peter Sarsgaard.

This film, however, The Mephisto Waltz, which I thought might be one of my big two, one of those Moby Dicks that I'm constantly on the hunt for, this one was made in 1970. It has the distinction of being the only theatrical film produced by 20th Century Fox during that entire calendar year of 1970, and it premiered in 1971. Now Rosemary's Baby, of course, had completely burned it down in 1968 in a totally revolutionary way. That one is really the progenitor of ‘70s cinema's obsession with the devil. So spurred by the success of Rosemary's Baby, the producer of The Mephisto Waltz went ahead and paid $250,000 for the film rights to Fred Mustard Stewart’s book. Frankly, it's not hard to see the similarities between the two, between Rosemary's Baby and The Mephisto Waltz, or at least the imprint of one on the other. We've got this educated passing for sophisticated, sufficiently urbane couple, and they're drawn in by a pair of Satanists of indeterminate age, and then they get involved in magic that benefits the Satanists more than the sweet young couple. So it's a little bit Faustian, but it's got jazz hands. It's a little bit of the other side of The Dunwich Horror, though even in the opening moments of The Mephisto Waltz, under those main titles, there's common imagery with The Dunwich Horror, a common treatment of the film stock, and a common color palette, because this is also kind of psychedelic and symbolic.

At the same time, when you think about The Dunwich Horror and the opening moments of The Mephisto Waltz, it already feels eminently more dangerous. It feels like we're about to get sort of fiction Kenneth Angered. There's something kind of gallo, like we might expect from Argento. Like maybe because it's American, it looks this way, it might almost be like Argento, just with more money and stricter oversight.

We're sort of not even out of the credits and it feels like those credits are doing a lot of heavy lifting for what the experience of the film is ultimately going to be. And we've got Jerry Goldsmith's pretty fabulous score, and we’re reminded that it's Jerry Goldsmith with a very acute violin sting when his name appears onscreen in that great period Helvetica. His score really does feel important and demonic. And it will continue in that vein and also be pretty demonstrative, in equal measure. The effect of the collision of image and sound in this film kind of has the effect of making the movie feel a little bit forbidden and authentically satanic.

In the first 10 minutes, we meet this very promising cast that we've been promised by the psychedelic titles: Alan Alda, Jacqueline Bisset, Barbara Parkins, and a young, nubile, young Curt Jurgens. And then immediately after echoing this ‘hands’ theme that we've been seeing throughout the entire opening sequence, we're at a party scene that's got witty dialogue and strange characters, and I'm hooked by this point. It’s like, take me anywhere you want to go. The whole thing reminds me a little bit of a Night Gallery segment called The Return of the Sorcerer. This was an episode from 1972, and I can't help but feel like it was informed a little bit by The Mephisto Waltz. This particular segment stars Vincent Price and Bill Bixby. But in that, in place of a dog in a Halloween mask, we have a goat named The Falling Tower who eats dinner at a table with Price.

But back to The Mephisto Waltz. I would say that the entirety of the film is really gorgeously production designed, costumed, and photographed. I think that William Spencer's cinematography is really agile and lithe and maybe a little bit more sophisticated than the young and artistic couple. It looks very expensive, but sometimes I think it looks a little bit “made for TV.” But at other times it's so gorgeous that I kind of found my breath being taken away by that kind of luxurious, soft focus, 70s-osity of the design and of how it's captured, how it's shown to us. Spencer's camera does more than just linger on the details; I think that it nimbly shifts perspective. In certain moments, we are Alan Alda as he's overtaken by the supernatural. But everything that we're seeing comes together really fabulously, and I think that The Mephisto Waltz is smart. The dialogue is really solid, which is great because there's a lot of it. I think it has a great setup. It's more psychological than most films we can compare it to, especially from that time. I think it's a slower burn and it's more unnerving. I think that it's strange and tense and macabre and a little ambiguous and sometimes perplexing. It blurs the line between dreams and reality.

And as it goes on, we get things that we expect from the horror genre and some things we don't. We meet incredulous authority figures and we get references to monstrous births. We have a strange funeral sequence. We get Curt Jurgens inadvertently pitching Benjamin Button. And we get the scariest appearance of a William Shatner mask prior to 1978. We get all of these things delivered to us in a very, very stylish, very sexy, very 70s package. This was one of the first films to the table exploring these kinds of ideas, a film from a major studio with a decent budget and a very good cast. Of course, it's not without its flaws, and I think that those flaws are philosophical and narrative and technical.

Was it the movie I was looking for? It wasn't. But am I glad that I saw it? I am.

To hear our discussion of The Mephisto Waltz, cl ick here.

Bradford Louryk