Year: 1976
Director: Martin G. Goldman
Stars: J.J. Barry, Kim Hunter, Carolyne Shelyne
It’s easy in our chaotic modern world with all its disparate points of tension to feel beset. As though some external force were set against you. I know I myself have felt this time and again. Runs of bad luck or unconnected bad fortunes seeming like the acts of some matrix that I can’t quite define. Nonsense, of course, but one can understand how superstitions perpetuate when the primitive mind is allowed to wander and worry.
But what if it weren’t all make-belief? What if something ineffable was set against you, promoting ill will and misfortune. Martin G. Goldman’s 1976 regional American folk horror Dark August presents a man under just such a malevolent focus. Call it a hex, call it a curse, Sal Devito (J.J. Barry) finds himself assailed by a mystical force set on vengeance for a humdrum act of evil.
Goldman insinuates Sal’s crime at the top of the picture before show it, meaning that for a short while we’re left unaware that he’s wronged anybody. We see a girl (Karen Lewis) running in a grassy field, then we hear the grave incantations of her unseen grandfather (William Robertson) against a set of beautifully gloomy, portentous Vermont skies. It’s only in confession with his friend Theo (Frank Bongiorno) that we learn of the hit and run, that Sal was acquitted in a court of law, and that he suspects the grandfather of holding a grudge against him.
While visiting a convenience store, Sal becomes overwhelmed. What could have been a psychic attack also plays perfectly as an episode of overwhelming anxiety, taking place at a time and place where mental health concerns – especially in men – weren’t likely to have been taken seriously or even welcomingly. Dark August depicts a small town milieu so divorced from contemporary ideas of mental health awareness that the only possibly explanation is supernatural. Panic attacks dog Sal throughout the film, even finding him in the midst of a love-making scene, suggestive of some level of stress-induced impotence.
Not that scenes of this nature weren’t occurring out in the world of 1976 of course. Particularly in the wake of Vietnam as veterans returned and found themselves displaced in a populous with no real understanding of the things they’d seen or done. Dark August could be read as an extended metaphor for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder manifesting in the blue collar American worker. The hit-and-run killing of a child sitting in substitution for the horrors of killing innocents abroad. Seen through this lens, many of J.J. Barry’s quieter, introspective scenes take on a richer context.
Not that running over a child isn’t enough to warrant his restless mind. When the act is returned to – tellingly at night while Sal can’t sleep – Goldman underpins with a lightly sorrowful bit of score from William Fischer. Fischer’s work is wide-ranging. Sometimes plaintive and lamenting, sometimes wildly experimental, employing electronic music as discombobulating counterpoint to the rural setting.
Sal’s psychological troubles manifest in other ways, and he admits to certain coping mechanisms. He talks of smoking whenever things get tough (and man is that something I can relate to; I’ve had to move house 3 times in 4 years, and every move has drawn me briefly back to old nicotine habits).
While Sal finds himself ominously threatened by cultish figures clad in dark robes, accidents mount up around him. Due to his flighty disposition he contributes significantly to a carpenter sawing into his own leg. Driving said carpenter to aid, the robed figure causes Sal to swerve, almost crashing their pick-up truck and triggering further memories of the hit-and-run. The horrors of Dark August are in the recurring potential for disaster and harm, a persistent state of agitation. Horror that exists as a threat rather than an explicit depiction or outbreak of carnage. It is the horror of anxiety.
This is expressed subtly but powerfully in a sequence in which Sal tries to reach the robed figure whose presence is disturbing him. Sal pursues the figure to a river, where he finds himself all-but stranded on some wet rocks, unable to reach the mysterious presence. Now, maybe its tapping into my own fears – having had a scary experience trapped on the rocks in a wild river in my childhood – but the scene is edited in such a way as to infer life-threatening danger throughout. It plays, also, into the elemental sense of horror that recurs throughout the picture, manifesting later on when Sal confronts a raging fire.
Sal is dismissive of superstition (referring to Jackie’s (Carolyne Shelyne) tarot deck as “bubblegum cards” – even after the reading is spot-on), but a visit to Kim Hunter’s psychic medium Adrianne makes him open up to the possibilities swirling around him. She handles the exposition, posing conjecture that someone with the ability to access the astral plain has invoked evil against him, and that the cultist form that has been dogging him is, in actuality, a demon.
Having located the object of focused will (thanks to Jackie’s expert snooping), Adrianne performs something between a seance and exorcism with Sal, Jackie and Theo in attendance. Goldman’s camera circles her and Hunter quite convincingly holds court. Dark August reaches a kind of false crescendo when Robertson’s disgruntled grandfather gatecrashes the makeshift ceremony, brandishing a firearm. Still, the sum of the scene is the requested acquiescence from Sal. That by submitting to the possibility of supernatural forces he has a chance of changing his fate. That to recognise something is to overcome it. The film’s finale, however, suggests this isn’t enough. Sal is forced to shoot his beloved dog which attacks him following yet another sighting of the dark robed individual. The terror, it seems, is not over. Further practical action to dispel Sal’s demons is required.
This kind of bleak, desolate, rural horror filmmaking at the fringes of America in the 1970s begat some amazingly effective movies. Dark August hits on a visual level. For pure aesthetics I love its combination of blue skies, red pick-ups and verdant hills of rolling forestry. It showcases the beauty of the region. It sells us the wholesome things of the American landscape. Then it underpins those things with a brooding, foul tension that evokes an old and hostile land. Sal feels like an angry and ignorant man lost on a dark continent that only presumes to appear idyllic.
In terms of the sheer, cumulative sense of disquiet, it belongs in conversation with the likes of the great Messiah of Evil and the still relatively-undiscovered The Child as an atmospheric gem lurking in on the verges of American horror like a dark and deadly hitchhiker, ready to terrorise the unsuspecting who pick it up looking for something to keep them awake. It might keep you awake, all right. Not through explicit horrifying imagery, but through the more insidious suggestion that nothing can save you from the forces amassing outside of your perception and that your efforts so far might not be enough.
The Lost Highway Hotel 