The Visitor (Italy, 1979)

While I spent a lot of the eighties watching every crappy horror film I could lay hands on, many still remained tantalising covers on video store shelves. When I was browsing for this year’s selection, the poster for The Visitor tickled my memory, and I realised how many times I’d walked past it, resisting its lurid charms. And what is the October Horror Movie Challenge if not an excuse to catch up with such missed opportunities?

The Visitor is currently streaming on the Arrow Video Channel in the UK.

Synopsis

In a bout of exposition that must have had the Church of Scientology’s lawyers reaching for their pad of writs, Blond Space Jesus tells a room of bald children about how an evil space tyrant came to Earth and spread his seed. We glimpse off-brand Xenu, or Space Satan, in a flashback that is clearly meant to evoke Star Wars but ends up looking like an outtake from Phantasm.

Then, we meet Raymond (Lance Henriksen, looking unhappy to be here), watching a basketball team he owns. This scene goes on for so long that you may wonder if The Visitor is actually a sports movie. Happily, Katy, the tween daughter of Raymond’s girlfriend, Barbara, turns up and uses psychic powers to make the ball explode, so we can move on to what passes for the plot.

Her daughter’s psychic powers are the result of Barbara being a descendent of Space Satan, although she only knows there’s something terrible inside her. Raymond is better informed, having been sent by a generic sinister cabal to impregnate her with a male child for some reason. This is derailed when one of Katy’s birthday presents mysteriously turns into a gun that shoots Barbara, severing her spine, necessitating the hiring of a would-be Mary Poppins with a secret agenda to help out around their concrete bunker of a home.

For the next 90 minutes, we watch Glenn Ford stalk Katy, trying to get past her guardian hawk, while John Huston loiters on top of an office block, signalling to his space brothers. We witness car chases, psychokinetic ice skating, and aliens in football helmets, before a resolution that involves pigeons pecking out evil like so much satanic bird seed. And then we sit quietly, wondering how much of all this we just dreamt.

General Thoughts

I miss the days when weird mid-budget films like this could happen. For all The Visitor‘s many faults, it’s entertainingly deranged, a product of undisciplined imagination. More money or even competence would have ruined it, or at least made it a lot less interesting.

The score is perhaps the most seventies thing about The Visitor — big and bold, rich with strings and horns. They get good mileage out of layering this over utterly mundane scenes, tricking us into thinking stuff is happening.

I can’t shake the feeling that The Visitor is meant to be The Omen for Scientologists. It also seems to want to be Close Encounters of the Third Kind in places, although the budget only allows for dancing spotlights instead of intricate model spacecraft. And Katie’s use of telekinesis to kill people obviously parallels Carrie and The Fury. None of these comparisons do The Visitor any favours.

Katie is a nice departure from the classic creepy kid archetype. She’s a blonde all-American athlete, very much not an outsider or a weirdo. It’s easier to imagine her as one of the kids who bullied Carrie White.

The cast is so much better than the film deserves, with Glenn Ford, Shelley Winters, Sam Peckinpah and John Huston in supporting roles. I can only assume the producers used the Larry Cohen method of courting former Hollywood royalty who needed the money. Either that or they forced them to act at gunpoint, which would explain Lance Henriksen’s performance.

Verdict

I stopped being able to enjoy bad films ironically a long time ago. This may have coincided with my giving up dope. I can’t remember for sure, which may also be the dope. Either way, when I say that I enjoyed The Visitor, there is no irony here. Sure, it’s terrible, but it’s an entertaining, weird kind of terrible. This is a film that probably shouldn’t exist, and I’m glad it does.

Everything about The Visitor is a dizzying mix of polish and incompetence. While it struggles to be coherent, and some scenes are confoundingly edited, the cinematography and direction are generally good. At the same time, the visual effects are perfunctory, barely masked by frenetic editing and wobbly camera work.

The strangest thing is the script. It is a half-developed series of set pieces with almost nothing binding them into an actual narrative. What story we get is largely conveyed through budget-friendly exposition, and we’re left to guess how the pieces fit together. But it feels churlish to argue about the coherence of a seventies Italian horror film. What’s more of a problem, perhaps, is that while stuff happens, it rarely feels like it’s happening, making this a long two hours.

While I’d recommend The Visitor, this is a qualified recommendation. It’s only going to appeal to people who like creaky, silly oddities. You might argue that it’s a cult film, but I suspect its cult is smaller than the one clustered around Space Jesus. Still, if you have a taste for the odd and a high tolerance for nonsense, The Visitor may warrant an invitation to your October viewing schedule.

The October Horror Movie Challenge

Please do join in and share your own thoughts with us about this or any other films as the month goes on. You can usually find us on BlueSky, Reddit, Discord, or on the other side of the mirror.

If you would like to play along at home, my provisional selections are:

Messiah of Evil (USA, 1974)
Milk & Serial (USA, 2024)
Why Don’t You Just Die! (Russia, 2018)
The Visitor (Italy, 1979)
Lake Michigan Monster (USA, 2018)
Save the Green Planet (Korea, 2003)
Daniel Isn’t Real (USA, 2020)
New Religion (Japan, 2022)
The Driller Killer (USA, 1979)
Saccharine (Australia, 2026)
Evil Cat (Hong Kong, 1987)
Stéphane (France, 2023)
Send Help (USA, 2026)
Vampire Clay (Japan, 2017)
Hokum (Ireland, 2026)
Jack Be Nimble (New Zealand, 1993)
Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman (Japan, 2007)
Undertone (Canada, 2025)
Blind Beast (Japan, 1969)
The Appointment (UK, 1982)
Vampyr (German, 1932)
The Fake Ghost Catchers (Hong Kong, 1982)
The Last Horror Film (USA, 1982)
Fréwaka (Ireland, 2024)
Angst (Germany, 1983)
Toys Are Not For Children (USA, 1972)
The Cycle (USA, 2026)
The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (Italy, 1971)
Meanwhile on Earth (France, 2024)
The Ambulance (USA, 1990)
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (USA, 2026)

A Final Note

If you have been enticed here by these posts, please do look around at some of our other film reviews. We also have a podcast, called The Good Friends of Jackson Elias, which occasionally covers horror films. If this appeals, you might want to check out some of the following episodes.