The Scare Salon

Exorcist ripoffs were a dime a dozen back in the 70s, with scores of them emerging from Spain and Italy (such as 1974’s Beyond the Door, which I discussed here). Amando de Ossorio’s 1975 film Demon Witch Child (originally released as La Endemoniada and sometimes also known simply as The Possessed) has everything you’d expect from an Exorcist knockoff: a troubled priest with an emotional back story, a single parent whose devotion to his work makes him somewhat neglectful of his daughter, a small Pazuzu-like statue, and a foul-mouthed possessed girl who levitates off her bed, crawls backwards, and does a 360-degree torso rotation (no pea soup vomit, though).

But Demon Witch Child, as the title suggests, also does something more original with the source of the possession, making it less a straightforward demon/devil invasion and more the case of a girl being taken over by the spirit of an evil witch. I love old school witch movies, so I was all on board with this angle.

Keep in mind that the print most easily available to stream (on Amazon Prime as of this writing) is pretty rough-looking, has some frames missing here and there, and repeats the first scene twice for some reason. There was also no option to watch it in Spanish with English subtitles, which I would have preferred, so I had to watch the English dubbing, which was not great. I got used to it after a while, though.

Anyway, at the very beginning of the film, we’re introduced (twice) to our previously mentioned evil witch, Mother Gautère (Tota Alba), who has entered a church and started trashing the place like she was Keith Moon and the church was a hotel room in Copenhagen. After her rampage, she swipes the sacred chalice and beats feet.

Police Commissioner Barnes (Ángel del Pozo) doesn’t seem to think the theft is that big of a deal, theorizing that it was probably just a bunch of bored teenagers horsing around and doing a sacrilege, as those crazy youths are wont to do. But Father Juan (Julián Mateos) is certain the chalice was stolen for a reason, specifically to be used in a Satanic Black Mass. Barnes snottily pooh-poohs the priest’s concerns, probably because he can’t be bothered to get off his blocky cop butt to do any actual police work.

Meanwhile, just as Father Juan surmised, Mother Gautère has kidnapped a baby (offscreen) with plans to sacrifice the little nipper and drink his blood from the chalice with the other members of her coven. The cops close in on the witch camp and arrest the old bat, interrogating her back at the station and trying to get her to tell them where the baby is. They even bring in the child’s distraught mother to beg the witch for information, but Mother Gautère is all, “Get fucked, lady, you’ll never find him.”

Commissioner Barnes takes a hardline approach, implying that he’ll torture the info out of her, but she doesn’t give a single shit, saying that her master will protect her, so torture away, she still ain’t squealing.

But then Barnes plays the ace up his sleeve: he’s going to inject her with sodium pentathol, which will make her confess whether she (or Satan) wants to or not. So rather than being chemically forced to spill the beans about the location of the sacrificial baby and the identities of her coven-mates, Mother Gautère yeets herself out the window and dies on the pavement below. Ding dong, the witch is dead, but unfortunately, the problems are just beginning.

You see, because Barnes gave her such an unreasonably hard time regarding the abducted infant, she decides she’s going to spectacularly fuck up his life. To wit, she gets her unnamed daughter (Kali Hansa, playing a character only credited as “Gypsy Witch”) to approach Barnes’s daughter Susan (Marián Salgado) at the park and gift her with a necklace and a strange little statue/doll that looks like a wooden dildo with a devil’s head that has glowing red eyes. Gypsy Witch tells Susan she must never show the statue to anyone and that she can only play with him when she’s alone in her room, a sentence that’s throwing up red flags all over the place. Susan stashes the devil dildo inside her teddy bear. With Susan thus primed, Mother Gautère’s transparent witchy spirit form wafts out of her corpse at the hospital and moseys over to Barnes’s place, where it inserts itself into Susan’s sleeping body.

Afterward, unsurprisingly, Susan begins acting like a possessed little asshole, throwing stuff around, floating above her bed, saying stuff in Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, and abusing her poor governess Anne (Lone Fleming), who she’d previously been very close to. Susan also makes wildly inappropriate sexual comments, such as once telling Anne to “go fuck your boyfriend and leave me alone,” and calling Father Juan “a goddamn queer or impotent.” Some poltergeist-type activity, such as doors opening and closing on their own, begins to occur, much to the chagrin of Anne and the other household staff.

Just as in The Exorcist, Susan’s dad, Commissioner Barnes, is convinced there’s a scientific explanation for Susan’s sudden heel turn and takes her to a doctor, who also thinks her problem is likely psychological. Later on, the witch coven has reconvened in the woods to finally do the baby sacrifice, and they psychically summon Susan to come lead the festivities. Susan arrives and, through some pretty decent makeup effects for the time, takes on the hideous appearance (and gravelly voice) of Mother Gautère before stabbing the squalling infant and passing his blood around in the chalice. Mmm, Satanic backwash.

After the baby’s corpse is found under a box on some waste ground by some kids playing there, some superstitious townsfolk dig up Mother Gautère’s body, impale her through the chest with a big iron cross, and set her on fire. This does not appear to have the desired effect, as the witch’s eyes open, she screams, and the possession shenanigans only get worse.

Father Juan, who has been hovering around the periphery of the action, has been trying to tell everyone that Susan is straight-up possessed, but of course, no one believes all that medieval witchcraft mumbo-jumbo. There’s also a whole-ass subplot about Father Juan previously breaking off the engagement to his fiancée Esther (María Kosty) in order to join the priesthood, and then later finding out that his abandonment of her led to her becoming a prostitute. She summons him to the brothel where she works in a desperate effort to get him to take her back and run away with her, but he gently refuses, after which it’s implied that she commits suicide, thus laying a whole shitload of guilt on the priest’s slim shoulders. I’m guessing this subplot was added to give Father Juan some character development and to draw a parallel with Father Karras’s guilt about his dying mother in The Exorcist, but because the “exorcism” at the end of Demon Witch Child isn’t all that long, exciting, or climactic (and isn’t entirely predicated on Father Juan’s actions anyway), the Esther angle just comes across as slightly pointless.

Anyway, because Susan isn’t enough of a shithead already, she decides she’s going to kill Anne’s journalist boyfriend William (Daniel Martín) for no reason other than eeeeevil. She calls William’s office and supernaturally impersonates Anne’s voice, asking him to come to the park and meet her immediately. Meanwhile, the actual Anne has snuck out of the house to speak to Father Juan, as she’s also now certain that Susan is possessed and knows that Susan’s father won’t listen to her.

William turns up at the park and Susan (in her Mother Gautère makeup) strangles the shit out of him, pulls down his pants, appreciatevely calls him “well-hung,” then slices his genitals off (offscreen). She takes the wedding tackle with her, wrapped in a tissue.

Now, because Anne’s voice was recorded on the phone call to the newspaper office asking William to meet her at the park, and because William was found dead and manhood-free in said park, Anne is at first suspected of his murder, despite her vehemently denying that she made the phone call. The cops are giving her the business, trying to get her to confess, but then Susan swans in with a gift for Anne. As you might have guessed, William’s severed meat and two veg are in the gift box, a fact which quickly disabuses the police of the notion that Anne was responsible for the murder. They finally wise up and start pursuing Susan instead.

Susan, for her part, has decided another baby sacrifice would really hit the spot right about now, so she asks her aunt if she can come over and see her conveniently newborn (and more importantly, unbaptized) nephew. While her aunt’s back is turned, the girl scoops up the baby and hightails it down the street, heading for the coven’s meeting place in the woods. This time, though, the cops (and Father Juan) are in hot pursuit.

The final confrontation, as I alluded to earlier, isn’t as harrowing or epic as the climax of The Exorcist; Susan basically tries to mess with Father Juan by appearing as Esther, Father Juan resists her tricks, and so forth. At one point, he places a small cross against her forehead, and it leaves a big burn mark there, like in a vampire movie. One thing I will give Demon Witch Child credit for, though, is that it had the stones to actually kill Susan off. That’s right; even though the “exorcism” is successful in the sense that Mother Gautère is expelled from her body, Susan herself dies in the process, proclaiming, “She’ll let me die in peace” (I’ll note that her sacrificial nephew is saved, however). It’s pretty bleak overall, and while I’m not saying that Regan should have died at the end of The Exorcist, it is interesting how European filmmakers gave zero fucks about killing off children in movies, something Americans were always really squeamish about.

So is Demon Witch Child a good film? I certainly enjoyed it for what it was, and even though it obviously lifts so many plot points and details from The Exorcist that pointing out the similarities in a drinking game would see you dead of alcohol poisoning within a half hour, it still has some intriguing idiosyncracies of its own, particularly with the addition of the witch coven. The dubbing is not ideal, the film quality is below par, and the ending is somewhat underwhelming, but the makeup and special effects are pretty decent for the time and budget, and the plot is engaging enough to be entertaining all the way through. It isn’t stuffed with gore or nudity like some other European films of the era, but it’s a fun possession story nonetheless, especially if you simply roll with all the Exorcist homages and take it on its own terms.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.