Intensity 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Directed by Michele Soavi.
What do you get when you mash up Alice in Wonderland with Rosemary’s Baby, add in hint of Midsommar, and include the American sister of the most famous scream queen, with an Italian writer and director for a film that’s shot in Germany? Why you get The Sect — AKA The Devil’s Daughter.
The Sect, featuring Jamie Lee Curtis’ older sister Kelly, is a wild mashup of ideas, images, and narrative that could only come from the mind of Dario Argento. While Argento didn’t direct The Sect his writing brought to life the fantastical. Satanists attacking hippies. Women subjected to insect impacts. Gnarly facial lacerations — and in some cases — complete facial removal.
Right after Argento was finishing up Two Evil Eyes with his long time horror co-collaborator — George Romero, and right before he jumped into direct Trauma his 17 daughter Asia, Dario took a stab at The Sect.
The Sect (1991) is a slow rolling, but chaotic film that follows Satanic cult hell bent on bring the DEVIL back to earth. It inexplicably begins in the desert in the flower power era where a group of off-the-grid hippies has convened for a honest to goodness freakout. The group is approached by a Charles Manson-Jesus mash who begins to slaughtering the hippies as a part of his satanic offerings.
Fast forward several decades, a young American schoolteacher in Germany, Miriam Kreisl (Kelly Curtis) is driving home one afternoon when an old man, Moebius Kelly (Herbert Lom), darts into the middle of the road. Kreisl avoids hitting him hits an elderly man, but she feels so horrible about nearly mashing him into the asphalt that she drives him back to her house to cleaned up and reoriented. Unbeknownst to her, Moebius, is not just a doddering old man, he’s the leader of a Satanic “Sect.”
Even more peculiar, her sub-sub-sub basement may be a portal to Hell — or an odd underwater birthing chamber — but more on that later.
Moebius, however, is fully aware of this infernal portal and begins to implement his Rosemary’s Baby-like plans with Miriam. As she sleeps, he deftly wanders into her room, produces vial with some sort of Satanic serum, and slowly withdraws a long black beetle that he immediate inserts in her nostril.
Miriam is immediately beset with psychedelic dreams, and she’s forced to contend with neighbors and friends that don’t believe her wild tales of birthing. Immediately following one of her spooky trances, she finds Moebius on her living room floor unable to breathe.
As Miriam discovered the darkest depths of her sub-sub-sub basement, the Satanists slowly be surely start to assemble around every facet of her life. What’s their end game? Bring Moebius back to life? Conjur Satan? Force Miriam to give birth to the child of Satan? World domination?
Weirdly, because of the somewhat inconsistent narrative, odd pacing, and lack of real exposition, the answer is ALL of these things in equal measure.
Should you see The Sect (AKA The Devil’s Daughter)?
In a 2018, DVD extra interview Argento noted that “Like almost all films they have a difficult start, right?” You sit down, you prepare, you think then you change and other ideas come to you. So that’s how it was with The Sect. For me The Sect was one of Michelle Soavi’s most interesting films, perhaps the most interesting.” It’s rather telling that, in the context of this interview, Argento would focus on the chaotic nature of the film, because that’s exactly what it feels like. Chaos.
Not a bad chaos, but a chaos nonetheless. All the performances, dubbed and otherwise, are perfectly fine grade B horror fare. Kelly does a wonderful job of keeping the sometimes slow nature of the film moving forward with her oblivious nature, but it’s the creepy Moebius who really steals the show. In an intense performance, the aging Moebius pulls no punches and brings a deeply strange focus to the character’s obsession to help rear a child for Satan.
While Soavi would work for Argento on some of his most famous films like Tenebrae (1982), Demons (1985), and Opera (1987), following the release of The Sect, Soavi retreated from the film industry in the mid-1990s to care for his ailing son. While he has an impressive career spanning many decades, it’s safe to say that The Sect may be his weirdest — and understandably — the most Argento-esque.
The Sect is Rated R and currently streaming on Tubi.