Deadly Blessing

DEADLY BLESSING

Directed by Wes Craven and released theatrically in the summer of 1981, Deadly Blessing follows a young woman named Martha who lives on a farm next to land owned by “the Hittites” (an Amish-like religious sect). Martha's husband Jim had been a Hittite but opted to disobey his father and leave the flock, thereby becoming shunned by his kin. Someone murders Jim fourteen minutes into the tale. Two of Martha's old friends (Vicky and Lana) arrive and stay with the widow to help her through her time of grief. Other nefarious events occur (a Hittite gets killed, someone unleashes a snake in Martha's bath, and Vicky's forbidden romance with another Hittite ends with her burned to death in her car), leaving the viewer to wonder who is behind this crime spree. “It's almost a traditional whodunit,” says Wes Craven (quoted by Brian J. Robb in the book Screams & Nightmares).

“What we tried to do with Deadly Blessing was to kind of do something a little bit different... in that we were gonna combine a murder mystery with a horror film,” says co-writer Matthew Barr in a featurette titled 'So It Was Written' on the Blu-ray. Barr continues, “Deadly Blessing takes basically a group we modeled on the Amish, but we made them of course more extreme, and we called them the Hittites... and the idea was to kind of set up a story with a repressive religious cult.” Barr explains that the plot involves “a young man who had left the fold, married an outsider, wanted to farm and live the modern way... he gets killed... that's where the murder mystery came in.”

On the home video commentary track, Wes Craven describes his input into the screenplay: “I did a pretty thorough rewrite. The script was in need of a lot of work.” Later, he adds, “It was an early script for the guys [Glenn M. Benest & Matthew Barr], and it had a lot of problems, so there was a lot of just making things more believable and trying to figure out the logic of it. That went on throughout shooting, I think; there was always constant rewrites and trying to make it make a little bit more sense... Structurally, it had a lot of problems, so I was just trying to straighten out motivations...”

Co-writer Matthew Barr (on a Blu-ray featurette) notes that even before Craven became attached to the project, he and Glenn M. Benest “had written the script about six or seven times already. We made some versions that were more violent, less violent, as we tried to kind of refine the story. And ultimately Wes Craven was brought in, and then he wrote and rewrote the script himself a couple of times...”

Glenn M. Benest recalls that Craven “came up with one of the scariest moments in the whole film where there's a snake in the bathtub. That is a frightening scene, and he came up with that whole thing.”

In the book Screams & Nightmares, Craven describes the origin of the snake scene: “I dreamed the entire scene as it appears in the movie complete with fades, colors, everything. I woke up and wrote it all down, and we shot that version. It worked beautifully.”

The screenplay originally ended with protagonist Martha saying farewell to her friend Lana after the two survive a harrowing night. Producers tacked on an epilogue in which a demonic creature erupts out of the floor in Martha's home and pulls the protagonist down (perhaps to hell). “The end was added on... it was forced by the studio. That was shot back in Hollywood after the film was all cut together. The producers, Jon Peters and Peter Guber, decided it needed a big spectacular ending, and they had this thing written,” says Wes Craven (as quoted by Brian J. Robb in the book Screams & Nightmares).

Co-writer Glenn M. Benest (in a video interview within the So It Was Written featurette on the Blu-ray) discusses the epilogue: “I'm pretty ambivalent about it because in a way it goes against what the film is about because to me the film is about that there isn't a devil or supernatural evil, that evil is in people. It's not out of some supernatural force... evil is what people do...”

Craven (on the home video's audio commentary track) recalls that the film wasn't well-received upon its release, but it did garner some praise. Carrie Rickey in The Village Voice called Deadly Blessing “a minor miracle: a consummately-crafted small genre movie with more ideas than most big movies...” Janet Maslin (in The New York Times) wrote that the project “is a better-than-average horror film, in large part because it isn't about terrified coeds being stalked by an ax-wielding loon. Its story is more original than that...”

More than three decades after its release, Deadly Blessing has become a cult classic. An odd film with a denouement (pre-epilogue) that only partially makes sense after repeat viewings, the project documents some beautiful landscapes and features a couple of particularly chilling set pieces (the notorious snake-in-the-bathtub bit and Lana's adventure while trapped in Martha's barn). “It's a flawed film in many ways,” Wes Craven laments toward the end of the Blu-ray's commentary track. I agree, but I also assert that the story is wholly unlike any other horror tale before or since, and for that alone Deadly Blessing is worthy of appraisal by genre fans.