Dark August (1976)

Day 24 of Sobriety. 

Dark August is one of the three films in Arrow Video’s American Horror Project Vol. 2 set. The film is about a man who has moved to a very small town in Vermont, and shortly after his arrival he accidentally hits a young girl in his car. He is acquitted of any responsibility for the accident, but the girl’s grandfather seeks revenge—through supernatural means.

I liked Dark August—certainly a lot more than the last American Horror Project film I watched, which was 1973’s Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood from Vol. 1. That film was a kind of very bizarre, trashy b-movie. In contrast, Dark August comes across as something akin to a 70s TV movie. I often like TV movies—I like the kind of low-key pacing and atmosphere they can have compared to theatrically-released films, and that was something I definitely liked that about Dark August. The film kind of ambles along with few surprises, but it’s an effective mood piece, and also serves as an appealing time-capsule of 70s small-town America. Interestingly, I recently labored through Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry (1955), which is also set in stunningly-shot Vermont--possibly its only saving grace in my own personal opinion.

Dark August's atmosphere was helped along nicely by its score, which intercut pleasing mellow orchestration with some quite bold electronics. While watching it, I was reminded of George A. Romero’s Season of the Witch (1974), another film that depicts magic and witchcraft within a commonplace suburban setting. I did, however, think the film was massively let down by its weak ending. As some commenters (including the film's director) have said, it doesn’t really have an ending. It just kind of stops. Had it come to some kind of actual conclusion or denouement, I think I would have like it a lot more.

I was looking at the IMDB reviews of the film, and one commenter emphasized that the main protagonist was a “hard drinking, chain-smoking man,” who “accidentally ran down a child in the street. Probably drunk driving.” Further describing him as “alcoholic…gross, unrelatable, the way he lives his life is obviously the curse. When does a curse ever work on someone who is sober and does yoga every day?”

 

I found those comments very interesting, for obvious reasons. The thing is, I don’t really remember the protagonist being presented as an alcoholic at all. I remember he did smoke a lot, because that is emphasized in the film—for example, his girlfriend gets on his case about it—but not really the alcohol. I remember there was one scene where he went to a bar by himself for “a drink,” but I don’t think he was even shown drinking in that scene.

 

 Anyway, reading those comments made me think that, as someone who has for many years been “Cursed By His Own Lifestyle” (the title of the review), maybe I need to go back and look at Dark August again.