Through the Eye and Into the Brain: Satan’s Slave

Synopsis: Catherine Yorke (Candace Glendenning) and her parents are about to take a ride out to visit the mysterious, unmentioned uncle Alexander (Michael Gough) at his remote estate for a weekend. When they arrive, her father Michael (James Bree) gets a sudden headache and runs his car into a tree, her mother Elizabeth (Celia Hewitt) is bonked on the head, and while Catherine stumbles toward the house for help, the car bursts into flames, killing her parents. What follows is a peculiar story about a young, newly orphaned woman, her odd uncle, her weirdly endearing cousin Stephen (Martin Potter), and the secretary who lives with them, Frances (Barbara Kellerman). Something odd is happening in the country estate. Perhaps it has something to do with Catherine sees of a long dead witch, Carmilla Yorke (Monika Ringwald), being put to Inquisitor lash and a fiery death? Perhaps it has something to do with her approaching twentieth birthday? Perhaps it has something to do with pagan rites? The sinister truth lies in Norman J. Warren’s savage oddity, Satan’s Slave (1976).

DANIEL’S TAKE

Although the synopsis above gets to the heart of the story being told, the movie does not start with Catherine. It starts with a strange, black magic ritual with a mystery man in a devil mask (with glowing eyes!) invokes some terrible power to take over the nubile flesh of a gorgeous blonde sacrificial victim. It then continues with Stephen seducing a woman, Janice (Gloria Walker), getting her drunk and then finding a place for her to sleep before tying her up and assaulting her. It continues with Catherine waking up in her boyfriend’s bed, receiving a birthday present, and then speeding home for her family trip. Then, it gets to the stuff mentioned in the synopsis.

Needless to say, the movie kicks off in unsettling territory. It does everything it can to wreck the audience’s sense of stability. Then, it carries along on its merry way into a more familiar black magic cult story about a woman discovering the weird goings on at her uncle’s lovely house. Of course, even some of that material is infused with disturbing elements. Oh, and copious amounts of nudity. There are no less than four women with breasts and pubic thatches on full display here, and perhaps only one of them has an enjoyable time after baring all—most others are tormented, ritually sacrificed, or pilloried for witchcraft.

Norman J. Warren made a couple of movies prior to this, but Satan’s Slave was his first horror flick. Made for a pittance with an eye toward far east distribution, it has all the hallmarks of what we might expect from such a go. Nekkid girls, a couple of extraordinarily messy/nasty bloody makeup effects (kudos for a surprise nail file introduced into a character’s eyeball), and a dreamlike plotting/screen story. According to a featurette interview with writer David McGillicray, the script was written in nine days and afterward some additional scenes were conceived by the director and producer for international distribution. The result is a picture that is a mishmash of strange moments, lovely idyllic locations, and a sinister vibe that will work for some of the flick’s target audience. It’s a fair start to a career in horror filmmaking, made with far more enthusiasm than one might expect, and yet it’s an odd duck movie that should not work even as it barrels along.

The performances are a treat, though (as I will go into later) some might argue that they are substandard. Michael Gough delivers a subdued and staid performance as the uncle. His agreement to appear for a lower fee in exchange for not interfering with his stage commitments afforded him a limited amount of time to deliver quite a bit of action and dialogue. He is always fun to watch, of course.

The real surprise is Martin Potter, who manages to play a charming psychopath. He brings both intensity and earnestness to his character that is refreshing, a realism to his interactions. However, he’s got a monster underneath his appealing exterior, which bubbles to the surface with surprising gusto. On paper, the character is reprehensible, a real fiend, and yet Potter brings some oddly endearing qualities to him that make him, gasp, somewhat sympathetic. This done after a rather savage introduction to the character in lengthy scene number 2. Rather surprising.

Candace Glendenning is a talented actress. She can charm with a smile, can make stilted dialogue sound natural, and the camera loves her face. The eyes, in particular, are stunning. Here, she gets to play a Nancy Drew investigative character sometimes, to play the freaked-out horror girl when something paranormal or sinister happens, and to play a young woman exploring a romantic triangle between boyfriend John and … her cousin Stephen? Ew. The plot has her shifting gears quite often, and there’s a lengthy bit at the end with some gaslighting efforts that is particularly well acted on her part. The movie’s editing makes a mess of her work, sadly, but it’s easy to see why she was cast in the lead. She has the look and the acting chops to do some interesting work.

Barbara Kellerman rounds out the main group in a film dubbed “four actors, one location” during an interview with producer Les Young. Like Glendenning, Kellerman gets to run the gamut of emotion, and her character is something of a foil for Catherine. Frances loves Stephen (even knowing what a fiend he can be! Yikes!) and she is tied to Alexander by an underdeveloped blackmail scheme, but she manages to turn the tables later on. Sort of. Kellerman gets to play the bad girl who tries to redeem herself through a Good Work and ends up paying the ultimate price. It’s a fun role, and the one least robbed of its arc and grandeur by the final screen story, and I am a sucker for this type of character. She plays it well.

Satan’s Slave is an oddity, an English production from the 1970s from a team that managed to deliver a weird little horror picture on a shoe-string budget that was achieved independently from major investors/studios. It ain’t a Hammer or Amicus picture. It ain’t a Universal picture and it never will be. It’s a little movie that manages to deliver a beginning and an end and a middle-shaped object sort of running between these extremes.

Something is a little wonky with the watching experience. At first, I assumed it was the script since dialogue did not quite synch up from time to time. There were lines that did not immediately feed into the responses they got, motivations got a little cloudy, and emotions would change at the drop of a hat—for example, Catherine would start crying uncontrollably while remembering her dead parents only to go utterly calm in the next frame. It’s not really the script, the acting is fair to good. It’s the editing that is responsible for the oddities here. Watching some of the featurettes on the Vinegar Syndrome DVD/Blu-ray clued me in as to why. As it turns out, the film first shot and delivered turned out to be a little too dialogue heavy—a death knell for some perceptions of audience. Words will bore audiences, after all. They came to see moving pictures. Some scenes were excised, others trimmed to something far shorter, and the end result is that while the movie fairly gallops along, it has some unusual choices for cuts between scenes or inserts. So, a woman who manages to stumble out of a car and walk toward a house to fetch help suddenly finds the car she emerged from transformed into a fireball. So, a crying jag shifts almost immediately. So, dialogue exchanges cut to the bone, characters flip-flopping in their perspectives not because they lost a protracted argument but seemingly on whim. This is a testament to the delicate balance actors, script, editing, and the other aspects of filmmaking bring to a production. Is the movie bad? Well, some would argue yes. I prefer to think of it as an avant-garde approach.

The Vinegar Syndrome transfer has some oddities to the images as well, particularly the color palates during opening scenes. I suspect this is due to some weird breakdown of colors in the negative, but the whole picture has a greenish hue cast over everything. Red wine and red blood take on an eerie violet tone. Catherine’s dark hair has green highlights. This would be a bit jarring for folks who prefer their horror films to be slices of realism; the effect lends these opening scenes an otherworldly quality, as though the world of the film is just slightly removed from our own.

As odd as it is, the film is an obvious labor of love and it has a wonderfully creepy vibe running throughout. When I was starting to get into the 1970s Italian horror pictures (back when they became available on DVD in the 1990s and early 00s) I was often given over to some interesting emotions when popping in an as yet unseen-by-me Fulci, Argento, Bava, etc. Those movies could go anywhere, could do anything, and I knew I was in for some crazy shocks. Clive Barker later complained about the glut of PG-13 horror “product” by suggesting his youthful assumption that the best horror movies were made by seeming madmen who could and would do anything for a shudder. Satan’s Slave gave me a taste of that old dread when it started running. The feeling did not last long past the opening three scenes, but it was there nevertheless, and it was a welcome return. Are director Norman J. Warren or writer David McGillivray madmen? Of course not. They seem absolutely charming blokes in the interviews. However, when Stephen is seducing, then binding Janice in the opening scenes and finally attacking her with scissors and whatnot? Well, watching that, I was taken with the unsettling notion that this movie could go just about anywhere and do just about anything to its characters. It was not playing nice, and it was not playing by any cinematic genre rules. Dread is not a comfortable sensation, but in the context of a horror picture it is a welcome one. At least for me. On that front alone, the picture is a success.

Although it is certainly off, a little wonky, a little head scratching from time to time, there is a power to Satan’s Slave that is impossible to ignore. Not a movie for all tastes, perhaps. The film is something best come to after some exposure to other, masterful works of the genre. However, on its own terms, it is a quirky, cult delight.

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Satan’s Slave is available in both a DVD/Blu-ray combo edition as well as a streaming edition.

Next up, we will continue our religious theme with a peek at one of the big three of folk horror films: Blood on Satan’s Claw explores a small, eighteenth century British town where a battle is playing out between Christianity and some of that Old Time religion … The film is available in DVD, Blu-ray, and streaming editions.

“Through the Eye and Into the Brain: Satan’s Slave” is copyright © 2021 by Daniel R. Robichaud. Poster and still image are taken from IMDB.

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