WARNING: Potential spoiler in second last paragraph. I don't give away the ending but if you haven't seen the film and want to, you should skip over it to the final par.
A toy tank buzzes across the ground. It rolls over a toy car. A real tank rolls over a real car, crushing it and the young family inside. A little boy walks up to the wreckage, inspects it and strolls off to meet some other kids. Titles.
A young family group at a multi-family picnic packs up when it starts to rain, and heads west in their car. The radio is getting weird. They pass the wreckage of the car at the beginning and drive to the next town to report it. No one at the sheriff's office is interested, not even to talk to them. The sheriff himself appears outside, marvelling at the newcomers. A small crowd of locals does the same, swamping the family car. They are not particularly sinister, just in wonder that anyone got through. Times are strange.
Stranger still, the town's kids are vanishing. We see them stop what they're doing and walk away in scene after scene. When the newcomer family try to leave to get help their borrowed car breaks down and it's back to square one. Meanwhile, the local charismatic retiree is marshalling up the elderly of the district, well thirteen of them, for some peculiar rejuvenative procedure.
This oddity of a supernatural horror film in a western setting is of its time in that it really isn't of anyone's time. Somewhere between the game changing Night of the Living Dead and The Exorcist (with a a sprig of Rosemary's Baby) the genre rules of horror were in tatters and its practitioners again had to work out what might scare or at least disturb the modern viewer. The three films I just mentioned were remarkable for finding the darkness in the light of day, the evil in the every day. Romero's zombies weren't created in voodoo rituals they just appeared. Rosemary faced witches but they were the nice old couple in the next apartment. The gothic would reappear later as it's pretty dependable fun but for now the horror was as real as a flat tyre or a vending machine, it lived where you lived.
And there in the sheriff's office with the injured and the dead the remainder of the people of the town slowly figure out what is happening and what they need to do about it. They are as nonplussed as we would be to find a coven forming in our neighbourhood that had real earthly power. The coven is in the process of changing its skin and is as fascinating and horrifying to behold as a snake doing the same thing, and the more you look the more natural it seems. This is how this film works, despite the shocks in the infreuqent violence, the terror lies in the fact that this act of supernature will happen regardless of their inertia or resistance. I read in a book about the confronting northern Rennaisiance painter Hieronymous Bosch that to the theistic medieval mind the notion that God might be no match for the Devil. If you can put that in your thoughts and assume such a postition it will feel like a waking nightmare. Now imagine it as an earnest thought, day after day, for the rest of your life and beyond it.
The widescreen canvas and plain-as-day pallette serve this end, bringing the horror of the potential defeat to the doorstep. By contrast, the extended Californian gothic palour/lair of the coven is virtually psychedelic, the juxtaposition of the old folk revelling in what looks like an acid rock band's cover art shoot would have rubbed roughly. And then there are the children themselves, normal whiny American kids who would have played with the likes of Sonny from Skippy or anyone from Flipper or Gentle Ben. Their plain faced atrocities remind us of how casually our own peurile tempers could seize us at that age. What better vessels for the leathery old witches of the gulch? In fact, it is the breathtaking expressionlessness of their faces that crawls into our eyes as the credits roll and the sickly music box score kicks in.
While it doesn't have the universal love of a Harold and Maude or even the cultish adoration of a Little Murders, The Brotherhood of Satan is unjustly obscure, an underplaying but solidly performing tale of horror in a genre that was back in gestation at the time and didn't really look like anything predictable. If it refers to gothic imagery here and there, the constrast with the ondinary world is pleasantly jarring. Cinema would return to churning out more gothic and contrived fare in the name of horror and even the Venn diagram overlap in the '90s of crime and horror in the serial killer movies took on an increasingly old school spookfest look and feel. It wasn't until the end of that decade when The Blair Witch Project fulfilled for the genre TS Eliot's thought that any revolution in poetry should start with a return to the banal. That doesn't mean it should be featureless or bland, just that it should feel like home and that home should not be trusted.
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