9 - The Fury

Summary

This review was published by Take One in 1978. With the exception of Blow Out, which complements the movies covered in this review, De Palma's later career took a different course than the one I hoped for here. What I like about this piece is the way it tries to address aspects of the movie that resist being put into words.

The trouble with film reviews is that so many of them say the same things, and in similar terms. “The word” is beginning to come out on Brian De Palma's new film, The Fury, and the point about that film, what makes it really worth seeing and thinking about, appears to be getting missed.

After seeing The Fury I walked into the sunny landscape; I was full of the film, moved and excited and feeling very clear. It was Saturday matinee time, and the movies had finally come up with a good scary horror film; I hadn't had such a good fright on a first-run basis since [Night of the Living Dead]. But more than that, the film had done something radical to the visual field, something I could recognize but not analyze; it fell somewhere between the physical luminosity of Barry Lyndon and the spiritual clarity of Vampyr, and when I got that far in my thinking I realized that my actual point of reference was not Hitchcock or Murnau or whatever “a De Palma film” is supposed to make one think of, but Werner Herzog.