Hey, Unk…
After reading several Traumafessions from the 1990s recently, I figured I'd send in one from the late '70s just to help balance things out a bit. It also doubles as a personal Name That Trauma that was finally solved a few years ago.
As an easily-scared kid who watched a lot of movies on T.V., one absolutely terrifying movie (did I mention that I was an easily-scared kid in the late '70s?) stuck with me for years. I only caught the last third of it or so, and it included a bunch of teens trapped in the woods by a demonic force, talismans made out of twigs, and an almost surrealistic, shambling monster. The lone survivor gets to the car and manages to escape, only to have the steering wheel mysteriously spun out of control, causing the car to crash.
When I saw THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT much later, images from this earlier film came leaping back into my memory, but nobody I described it to had any idea what I was talking about. In the days before the mighty Kindertrauma, the internet was of no help at all in identifying it.
You've probably already guessed which movie this was, and I finally discovered the answer after Criterion released a special DVD of…yep…EQUINOX!
Kind of embarrassing to realize EQUINOX scared the bejeebus out of me back then, but such is the stuff Kindertraumas are made of. It might, however, be the reason I always felt WKRP's Herb Tarlek to be something of a tragic figure.
— Binrow the Heretic
I don't know which is more traumatizing, the beasties or those epic B-52's perched on those girls heads. Who goes picnicking in polyester capri pants? :-O
A fried chicken picnic no less! The most amazing thing is that Equinox has a Criterion collection edition. No home should be without it!
Equinox rules!
I didn't know about Criterion collecion edition, got to buy it!!!
Equinox is great. I love how the Devil is obsessed with litter and the girls' wigs change from scene to scene.
I must admit though that there's one shot – a forced perspective effect involving a giant – that is really remarkably good. It jumped out at me and I did a little digging and it turns out that the guy that really made the film, David Muren, went on to work on photography and special effects for some minor films that you might have heard of such as Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Close Encounters of the Third Kind , Dragonslayer, The Abyss , Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Jurassic Park. Not too shabby.
There's a "Evil Dead" sort of flavor about the whole thing as well, though Raimi and Campbell have
claimed they hadn't seen it.