In the opening flashback of The Devonsville Terror (1983), the good menfolk of 1683 Devonsville, as their brethren in Salem would less than a decade later, root out the three most attractive single women in the area (threatening figures of feminine liberation and secret knowledge) to brutally torture them to death in a fire-lit spectacle. The film then jumps to 300 years later, when Walter Gibbs (played by Office Space’s own Paul Wilson) murders his wife, inadvertently calling forth a “messenger from the unknown” in the guise of new schoolteacher Jenny Scanlon (Suzanna Love), brought by bus from Princeton, New Jersey to seek revenge for her ancestral sisters, whose cruel deaths reverberate in the town’s all pervasive misogyny. Will Scanlon recognize her power in time to prevent the local thugs from reenacting the deadly inquisition on her and two other single women?
The Devonsville Terror was the fifth collaboration between Ulli Lommel and his then-wife, Suzanna Love. As Love recalled in a 2023 interview for Vinegar Syndrome’s Blu-ray release, the film came about from Lommel’s desire to take advantage of a newly-constructed and particularly affordable studio in Tomahawk, Wisconsin, as much as a shared, if vague, interest in the Salem witch trials. With its brick schoolhouse and vibrantly hued deciduous trees, Tomahawk passes effectively for New England in the Fall. The beautiful landscape is powerfully captured throughout The Devonsville Terror: its piercing, chilly sunsets and white birches standing stark against the burnt oranges and murky black ponds of the surroundings, from the rattle of an old metal school bus on an empty country road to the lone neon sign in the window of the tiny “Groceries and Beer” mart where Scanlon stocks up for her new home with milk, apples, and mayonnaise, though no “real herbal tea,” the witch’s brew. The scenery has an undeniably haunted atmosphere.
Describing the anxiety she’d felt when entering the local bar in Tomahawk, Love noted, “we’re a violent culture.” The film simmers with this threatening undercurrent. The idiosyncratic instances of the supernatural, as well as the gory deaths meted to Gibbs and his friends (all featuring righteous practical effects from Matthew W. Mungle, the visionary behind The Silver Bullet and a member of the makeup team on Bram Stoker’s Dracula), are no match to the real terror of Devonsville: its men. Scanlon’s first interaction on the outskirts of town is with Ralph, whose opening line, “Need a ride?” flung casually from the drivers’ seat of his roaring pickup sent a shot of cold fear into this viewer’s heart. When Ralph’s father creeps up on Sarah, another single woman from out of town, and asks, “Aren’t you scared to be out here alone?” her nervously-smiling “Should I be?” reverberates in the pitch black night like a throat-clenching death knell. For a film that opens on a horrific triple femicide and features a fair amount of (women’s only) nudity, The Devonsville Terror effectively portrays a very real misogyny that well earns its just, Suzanne Love-dealt rewards.
The Devonsville Terror screens tonight, August 28, and on August 30 and 31, at Anthology Film Archives on 35mm as part of the series “That Very Witch.”
