Circle of Fear (1973): "Legion of Demons"

Devil worshipers and witches were big players in the horror productions of the 1970s, thanks in part to films such as Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Asylum of Satan (1971), Brotherhood of Satan (1971), Race with the Devil (1975), The Devil’s Rain (1975) and The Omen (1976).  

This episode of the horror anthology Circle of Fear (1973), capitalizes on this trend with the deeply creepy, occult-centric episode titled “Legion of Demons.”

Written by Anthony Lawrence, “Legion of Demons” concerns a naïve young woman from the country, Beth (Shirley Knight), who -- at the urging of her friend, Janet (Kathryn Hays) -- leaves her small town home and goes to work in the big city, in L.A.  There, Beth joins Janet on the job in a skyscraper office building, working as a secretary. 

But one day, after a meeting with the office manager, Mary (Neva Patterson) and other employees, Janet disappears without a trace.

Shirley begins to experience terrifying dreams involving Janet, and feels increasingly uncomfortable as Mary and the other employees on the thirteenth floor urge her to replace Beth there. 

Soon, Shirley discovers the dark truth.  Mary and the others are part of a Satan-worshipping coven, and Janet has not been killed…she’s actually the head witch!

It isn’t much of a stretch to see that “Legion of Demons” is actually a (fun) commentary on its central business setting: an impersonal, late 20^th century, “high-tech” office building.  Here, an employee is urged to “conform” to office politics, and the promise of promotion and other perks is tied to her acceptance of the office culture. 

Furthermore, success and fortune -- the accumulation of money -- is tied directly to the corporate world, a place where folks must leave their souls behind if they wish to excel.  “Legion of Demons’” subtext is all the more amazing for the fact that it precedes President Carter’s “crisis of confidence” speech by six years and President Reagan’s “yuppie” milieu by more than a decade.

Although this episode -- like virtually every recent installment of Circle of Fear -- relies on old standards such as weird nightmares and screaming damsels, this episode is nonetheless visualized in strong fashion.  

At one point, for instance, the episode cuts to an extreme high-angle shot of Beth seated in a chair, surrounded by the coven. The positioning of the witches reveals a five point or pentagram structure, a nice reflection of the group’s true nature.   

The revelation of Janet as the coven’s evil leader -- via creepy distortion lens imagery -- also ably suggests a world gone mad.

Much of the suspense in “Legion of Demons” emerges from the depiction of another new office employee, played by Jon Cypher.  All along, the episode plays this affable employee as a possible co-conspirator with the coven.  Every moment he’s one screen, we expect him to reveal his true, insidious colors.  But the episode has other plans for the character, thus smartly confounding expectations.

The most basic test for an episode of a horror show or a horror film even is an affirmative answer to the question: “is it scary?”  Although it clearly apes Rosemary’s Baby, and probably features one or two too many chases up and down an office corridor on the thirteenth floor, I still found “Legion of Demons” sufficiently frightening.  I was watching it alone (while my wife was asleep next to me in bed), at about 11:00 pm, and the episode gave me a good case of the shivers.

Given this fact, as well as the entrenched commentary on office politics, “Legion of Demons” proves itself another unexpectedly strong entry in this 1973 anthology.  I would need to check all the stats to be certain, but it certainly feels at this point like Circle of Fear boasts a better batting average than the Ghost Story component of the show.

Circle of Fear (1973): "Earth, Air, Fire and Water"

While discussing the Circle of Fear episode “Dark Vengeance,” I described a kind of anti-sense or nightmare logic that canny horror productions sometimes marshal and deploy to good effect.  One of the absolute champions of the approach may well be the Circle of Fear episode, “Earth, Air, Fire and Water,” written by Dorothy Fontana and Harlan Ellison.

I shouldn’t beat around the bush about this episode. When I wrote about it for my horror television survey, Terror Television (1999), I gave it a pretty negative rating and review.  But today, a decade and beyond later, I find my own commentary on the episode poorly-supported and flat-out wrong.  After a recent viewing of “Earth, Air, Fire and Water,” I feel like I can see it better for what it is: a genuinely upsetting and highly unnerving hour.  

Perhaps what I was reacting against originally were my own feelings of discomfort.  Who can say for sure? 

But now, today, I count “Earth, Air, Fire and Water’s” capacity to unsettle as a very real strength, not a weakness.  This episode is deeply scary in a cerebral way. It manages to vet some terrifying moments with precious little in terms of resources.

“Earth, Air, Fire and Water” concerns a group of starving artists -- a 1970s commune of sorts -- that rents a dilapidated shop in a quaint downtown area and begins to sell their creative wares there.  While cleaning up the place, the artists come across an old chest.  Inside are several transparent jars filled with strangely-colored fluids.  

In a short amount of time, exposure to these jars begins to turn the artists’ work…sour.  A landscape painter now creates creepy paintings worthy of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, for instance, instead of views of scenic shores and light houses.  The group's esprit-de-corps shatters like glass, and something sinister seems to hang in the very air itself.

We learn -- though only obliquely -- that the former residents of this building practiced black magic.  But beyond that blanket explanation, we’re given no real cause for the artists’ strange change, or any real origin for the bizarre jars.  

From the episode’s first frames -- a low traveling shot through the interior of a wrecked shop -- “Earth, Air, Fire and Water” develops a strong, almost overwhelming sense of amorphous dread.  We hear individuals (souls trapped in the jars?) talking to one another, but we don’t know where they are or what, precisely, they are.  The effect is unsettling.  We know we should feel alarmed and frightened, but there is no focal point for those feelings.  Instead, we just feel...uncomfortable.

There’s an interesting metaphor at work here as well, and yes, it escaped my radar when I wrote Terror Television.  In short, this episode concerns the transformation and decay of the hippie dream from the 1960s into the 1970s.  It concerns people -- hippie artists -- who optimistically build a collectivist world of art, intellect, and commerce but then become separated from one another, trapped and demented inside their tiny individual worlds, ones represented by the unusual and devilish jars.

This could be a comment on how deeply ingrained individualism and capitalism -- or selfishness -- are ingrained into the American culture.  Or this could be an allegory for the terror and perversion that infected the hippie dream as manifested by Charles Manson.  Love became hate.  Belonging became an opportunity for group delusion and madness.

However you choose to read it, “Earth, Air, Fire and Water” is very, very 1973.  It’s about the death of a social movement, and that death, make no mistake, is one of a spiritual nature.  Corruption turns the artists into isolated self-consumed monsters.

The episode’s terrifying final moment -- in which this spiritual decay unexpectedly takes over a human being -- seems to represent well the Manson phase of the hippie dream. Ugliness is now manifested not just inside, but outside...as flesh.   It’s a shocking and terrifying image that lingers in the memory, for certain.

I didn’t really understand everything that was going on with “Earth, Air, Fire and Water,” when I wrote about it in 1998, but I sure hope I’ve now rectified my initial error in judgment by posting this review.  This episode is light on dialogue and characterization, but extremely powerful in tenor and atmosphere.  It’s one of the very best and most challenging of all Circle of Fear episodes, and a good one to watch with the lights out.

Circle of Fear (1973): "Dark Vengeance"

One of the oddest qualities about Ghost Story/Circle of Fear is that it is a TV series of such wild extremes.  When it is bad…it’s really, really bad.  But when it’s good, the series can absolutely hit one out of the park.

“Dark Vengeance” is a Circle of Fear episode that hits one of the park. 

Written by Peter L. Dixon, this episode stars Martin Sheen and Kim Darby as a happily married couple – Frank and Cindy -- that intersects, unexpectedly, with inexplicable horror.  Sheen plays a construction worker who unexpectedly digs up a crate from a work site.  Frank is reluctant to open the sealed-up, old crate, but does so on the urging of co-workers and his wife. 

He finds inside a miniature old rocking horse.

This discovery doesn’t sound especially chilling, but Darby’s character, Cindy begins to experience nightmares of the rocking horse growing to elephantine-size and trampling her.  And worse, the rocking horse boasts this unfortunate habit of moving about of its own volition.

Soon, the unfortunate couple realizes that the rocking curse is exercising an old revenge curse upon them based on an incident from Cindy’s long-forgotten youth.  But the horse keeps growing in dimensions and develops devilish red eyes.  It is relentless.

Finally, Frank discovers the key to trapping the rocking horse involves the crate where it was found, and a mirror…

On paper, this whole story sounds utterly ridiculous: a couple is haunted by a tall rocking horse.  And yet, I’ve learned from long experience with the genre that horror stories sometimes work best not on a logical or rational level, but on a surreal level that I term “anti-sense.” 

For lack of a better word, it’s all about nightmare logic.  Consciously we may be able to shrug off the absurdities, but “Dark Vengeance” taps into all these lurking anti-sense fears.  They include fear of inanimate objects, fear of toys, and fears of being in a never-ending chase.

“Dark Vengeance” unfolds like a very bad dream indeed as the couple is menaced beyond reason and beyond rationality by the malevolent hell-bent rocking horse.  It grows to huge size.  It rolls from their house to their workshop.  It escapes the pincers of a vise.  It even evacuates from a fire-place when Frank attempts burning it. 

All this happens, and the threatened couple never thinks once of going to the police or seeking help from neighbors.  Instead, they are trapped in a bad dream, one from which they can’t awake, and one with precious few options for escape.

On this “anti-sense” level, the episode works really, really well.  There are no visual special effects to speak of to depict the horse in motion.  Instead -- for the most part -- the rocking horse simply shows up where we know it shouldn’t be…but where we secretly expect it and dread it. 

Frank turns on a light in the garage work shop and there it is.  Cindy goes into her bedroom, and finds it lurking in a corner…just sitting there.  Somehow, the story is all the creepier because, most of the time, we don’t see the horse changing or moving.  The thing’s very presence is enough to evoke chills, and we are left to imagine its form and shape of transit.

My wife and I watched this episode together a few nights ago, and we riffed on it a little, sort of shrugging off the funny 1970s fashion and touches.  The episode starts slow, to be certain. But by the twenty-minute point of “Dark Vengeance,” we were totally involved, and more than a little unnerved by the malevolent rocking horse.  The show just keeps plugging and plugging -- with a kind of insane sincerity -- and it breaks down rational resistance.

“Dark Vengeance,” like “Time of Terror,” goes right to the top of the Ghost Story/Circle of Fear episode catalog.  It shouldn’t work at all, but it really does.  Don’t watch “Dark Vengeance” alone, or with the lights off…

Ghost Story/Circle of Fear (1972 - 1973) Final Episode Tally

Episode Title	Good	Fair	Bad
The New House	X
The Dead We Leave Behind	X
The Concrete Captain			X
At the Cradle Foot	X
Bad Connection		X
The Summer House			X
Alter Ego	X
Half-a-Death			X
House of Evil	X
Cry of the Cat		X
Elegy for a Vampire			X
Touch of Madness		X
Creature of the Canyon		X
Time of Terror	X
Death’s Head			X
Dark Vengeance	X
Earth, Air, Fire and Water	X
Doorway to Death		X
Legion of Demons	X
The Graveyard Shift	X
Spare Parts		X
The Ghost of Potter’s Field		X
The Phantom of Herald Square	X

Here’s my final tally quality for Ghost Story/Circle of Fear.  Although the  horror anthology series started out as relatively weak, it finished relatively strong.  Overall, eleven episodes out of twenty-three I would rate as good or great, which is a strong tally for a series.

The best episodes -- and ones I highly recommend -- are:

“The Dead We Leave Behind” (w/Jason Robards)

“Alter Ego” (w/Helen Hayes)

“House of Evil” (w/Jodie Foster)

“Time of Terror” w/Patricia Neal)

“Earth, Air, Fire and Water”

“The Graveyard Shift” (w/John Astin)

“Legion of Demons” (w/Shirley Knight)

“The Phantom of Herald Square” (w/David Soul)

I must confess, I am pleasantly surprised how well so many of these episodes hold up after forty years.  Also, the series improved radically once Sebastian Cabot’s Winston Essex and Mansfield House were jettisoned from the format and the program became Circle of Fear.

If you can only watch three episodes, my top episodes would include "Alter Ego," "House of Evil," and "Earth, Air, Fire and Water."

Cult-TV Blogging: Circle of Fear: "The Phantom of Herald's Square" (March 30, 1973)

The final episode of the 1972-1973 horror anthology Ghost Story/Circle of Fear is called “The Phantom of Herald Square,” and it’s the series’ first out-and-out romance, or love story.  And as is appropriate given the genre, it’s a tragic love story.

Here, a young artist in California, Holly Brown (The X-Files’ Sheila Larken) meets a handsome man in the park, James Barlow (David Soul).  He professes his love for her almost immediately, and Holly is resistant to his advances at first.  Over time, however, she falls in love with him.  As they grow close, however, strange incidents are also reported in the park.  A young woman dies there.  And Holly herself is accosted twice by a strange old man (Victory Jory).  He warns her not to see James again.

As it turns out, James knows the causes of these mysterious incidents very well.  As he explains to Holly, he once made a deal with the Devil to live forever so he could continue to “see the world.”  

Now, the Devil and his firm, called Gerontology, watch over James from a nearby skyscraper.  Every night, as part of the deal he signed, James must transform into his true form -- as an old man -- and also get lovely young women, like Holly, to give up their youth and very lives so he can continue eternally.

Realizing that she is indeed in love with James, Holly visits Mr. Matthews (Murray Matheson) at Gerontology and offers her soul for the same deal that James signed.  When David learns of this act, he angrily goes to Gerontology and says he is ready to cash in.  The Devil can take his soul now if only the contract with Holly is torn up.  The Devil agrees, and James and Holly are left to share a final, tender goodbye at Herald Square.

Buttressed by a seventies era folk-ballad, and stylish montages of Holly and James walking together by the glimmering (manmade) lake at Herald Square, this episode of Circle of Fear is undeniably cheesy. 

And yet, the love story is resonant.  Both James and Holly are people who don’t expect to find love, but do find it.  And then, they both make sacrifices for that love that are powerful.    The valedictory scene, with James sacrificing immortality so that Holly will never go through its torments, is enormously affecting.   

It’s not an easy choice.  James asks what will happen to him below (meaning in Hell), and Matthews paints a terrible picture.  James will serve the Devil and be tormented…for eternity. Even in the face of such unending suffering, James sticks to his guns.  He puts his love, Holly, above his desire to live.

Outside of the touching love story, “Phantom of Herald Square” is memorable since it poses the idea that the Devil works in a modern business office (as was the case in “Legion of Demons”) and that -- worse than that -- he cloaks himself behind science, under the business name “Gerontology.”

This story by Edward DeBlasio and Seeleg Lester has elements of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and is well-acted by Soul and Larkin.  Their performances skip over some of the tale’s harder-to-believe aspects, and make for a surprisingly strong and emotional hour.  It’s a good note to leave the series on…

Next week, I move to a new cult-tv blogging selection. I’ll be watching and reviewing all episodes of the Canadian science fiction series: The Starlost (1973).  It’s been called the worst sci-fi TV series ever made, by some, and for the next several Sundays, we’ll see if that’s really the case.

Cult-TV Blogging: Circle of Fear: "The Ghost of Potter's Field" (March 23, 1973)

In some ways, this week’s episode of the 1973 anthology Circle of Fear, “The Ghost of Potter’s Field,” plays like a remake of the extraordinary Ghost Story episode “Alter Ego,” by Dorothy Fontana.  

In that installment, as you may recall, a young boy was faced with a devilish doppelganger, one who wanted to steal his very life from him.  As the boy grew weaker, his malevolent opposite grew stronger and stronger…

“The Ghost of Potter’s Field” re-establishes the doppelganger concept, and the dynamic wherein only one individual can hold onto his life, with the counterpart facing oblivion.  Here, an investigative journalist named Bob Herrick, played by Tab Hunter, goes to visit a grave yard in Potter’s Field.  He believes the little-known cemetery might make a good story, because buried there are several men and women whose identity was not known at the time of death.   

On his first visit, Herrick is surprised to see what looks like an exact double watching him from afar.  Before long, this sinister counterpart insinuates himself into the journalist’s life, attempting to kill his friends and ruin his professional reputation.

The journalist and his girlfriend, Nisa King (Louise Sorel), realize that to destroy the doppelganger, they must learn his identity in real life.  They soon learn the doppelganger was once a gangster, and a man murdered by another gangster.  When they finally confront the spirit at Potter’s Field, they urge it to go after that murderer, not the journalist.  It seems to do so.

The concept of a writer battling an evil alter-ego is one that later found life in the 1990s, in Stephen King’s novel The Dark Half.  Here, the story is competently told, but all the horror elements do feel lifted from “Alter Ego.”  That story -- one of Ghost Story’s undisputed best -- succeeded so admirably because it featured a battle between the devil doppelganger and a kindly old teacher (Helen Hayes).  

That episode really put the audience in her court, as the evil child kept tormenting her.  “The Ghost of Potter’s Field” doesn’t find any story hook or character nearly as interesting. Tab Hunter isn’t especially expressive, but Louise Sorel shines as his more-knowledgeable and helpful girlfriend.

Next week, we reach the last Ghost Story/Circle of Fear episode, a masterpiece called “The Phantom of Herald Square.”

Cult-TV Blogging: Circle of Fear: "Spare Parts" (February 23, 1973)

In “Spare Parts” by Jimmy Sangster and Seeleg Lester, two men and one woman receive vital transplants after the accidental death of Dr. Pritchard (Don Knight), a world leader in the field of transplant surgery. 

After the operations are complete, however, Pritchard’s malevolent ghost inhabits each of the recipients in an attempt to force a confession of murder out of his widow, Ellen (Susan Oliver).

I must confess here that I’ve never been a big fan of horror stories in which the organs of the dead manage to take over the minds of the living.  

We have seen this familiar story on Rod Serling’s Night Gallery (“The Hand of Borgus Weems”), Quinn Martin’s Tales of the Unexpected (“A Hand for Sonny Blue), and in John Carpenter’s Body Bags (1993) among others.  At the movies, the idea has dominated such films as Oliver Stone’s The Hand (1981) and Body Parts (1991). 

My problem with the story is that transplanted body parts are just…tissue.  They have no souls, and bear no life of their own.  They are mere flesh (without consciousness), and this is settled science.   I have a difficult time suspending disbelief when I see the souls of serial killers living on in their transplanted eyes/hands/hearts, etc.  It just seems silly and willfully ignorant, at least to me.  And I worry that it does real life harm.  Organ donor-ship is a great thing, and I'm afraid ignorant beliefs about it prevent some people from donating.

Anyway, “Spare Parts” involves a ghost whose transplanted larynx, hands, and eyes magically take-over three normal individuals.  These normal individuals then become mindless minions of the ghost, carrying out his evil bidding.  It is never explained how the ghost acquired this power of possession.  Even worse, the ghost is depicted (in flashbacks) as a really terrible, abusive man, so you wonder why he was given this tremendous ability to strike back from the after-life.

In terms of the story’s particulars, Ellen (Oliver), the ghost’s wife, indeed murdered her husband, but the episode makes it pretty clear that he had it coming.  It’s not like he was a good man betrayed by a scheming black widow or something.  

Rather, he was an awful man who promised Ellen a life of entrapment, misery and pain.  He wouldn’t give her a divorce, and she was left with precious few options except to remain in an unhappy marriage with a monster.  I’m not condoning murder, I’m just saying that it’s not like Ellen murdered a good man to go off and have an affair with another man.  She was trapped, and she made an escape for herself on immoral (but clearly desperate) terms.

Why are we to hate Ellen and root for the evil Pritchard to make her confess?  “Spare Parts” never really sells that idea, and so the story is not entirely successful because we sympathize with Ellen more than we do with Pritchard.  

Also, if everyone can see and hear the ghost of Pritchard anyway, why go to all the trouble of possessing the transplantees?  Why not just finger the murderer as a ghost?

Although I enjoyed watching the great Susan Oliver in this story, “Spare Parts” lives up its title in that it feels like a bunch of standard horror elements -- evil transplants, revenge from the beyond the grave, and ghosts -- in search of a coherent narrative.  

Accordingly, this is the weakest Circle of Fear episode in a while, perhaps since “Death’s Head.”

Next week: “The Ghost of Potter’s Field”