Late Night Classics – The Unholy

Wherefore art thou, companies like Vidmark Entertainment, Cannon Films, and New World Pictures? Before the dawn of the digital disc, there were only a few ways to see a preview for new movies. There were your theatrical trailers and your television spots; but I got the most joy out of the coming attractions that were put before, and a lot of times, after the feature presentation on a video cassette.

There is not a single horror fan who did not rent The Monster Squadupon its home video release way back when. On that copy from Vestron Pictures was a trailer for the religious horror thriller The Unholy, a picture I saw for the first time a few years back, and something I had been wanting to see ever since Michael Gingold reviewed it in an issue of Gorezone. It was shunned by genre pretenders who were busy shoving their noses up the arses of the latest studio drivel and it never found its audience. I tracked down the director of The Unholy, Camilo Vila, for a rare conversation about his 1988 picture.

Jason Bene: Philip Yordan originally wrote the script in the 70′s after the box-office success of films like The Exorcist and The Omen. Can you talk about how you found the screenplay in his office while you were working on another movie?

Camilo Vila: It is a long story and I am going to try and be brief as I can. There was a script called Death Matchand it was getting a lot of heat in Los Angeles. That script was one of the reasons I moved to Los Angeles. At one point an associate at Philip Yordan’s company wrote the script and approached me and my partner. He actually had us look through a few scripts and one of them was for The Unholy. I read it and I immediately said, “There’s a story here and it is very different. I can make it into something.” I got very excited. I rewrote it and they were never able to get the financing. I did a page one rewrite and that’s that.

Jason Bene: How much of the supernatural overtones were part of the original script?

Camilo Vila: The supernatural was always there. A lot of it was taken away in the editing by the producers. I didn’t finish the movie. I did the director’s cut and they took it over and changed the ending. What I did with the script was add more of a religious aspect. Not just supernatural but religious. The script I wrote and shot, which is no longer in the movie, took place in the forty days of night. In the first act when the guy falls, that was on Ash Wednesday. That was in my cut. The night of the resurrection is when he encounters the demon. My movie was more of a mystery-suspense. I brought a religious aspect to it. Throughout the movie it was all real or the murders seemed like a hoax. At the end you find out it really was a demon and it was killing priests. The producers took all of that out because it was too religious. They turned it into a gore movie. In the beginning you see the demon that pushes the priest over the ledge. They took out the mystery and suspense. A lot of the dialogue had no meaning anymore. The ending was reshot by John Dykstra. They did it with the guy who had done the puppets. It was no longer my movie.

Jason Bene: I read somewhere that there were test screenings and the response by some was the movie needed more violence and gore. I heard that the effects artist, Bob Keen, filmed the new ending.

Camilo Vila: That’s what I told you. John Dykstra did the original ending and Bob Keen reshot it. He was the puppeteer on Alien.

Jason Bene: Were there any monsters or demons in your cut?

Camilo Vila: At the end. Only at the end did you know it was a demon. John Dykstra is a very creative guy, but we never found what the ending should be until after the movie had been taken away from us. Even though John Dykstra’s ending is not what it should have been, it was a lot better than the one we ended up with.

Jason Bene: Did you have a religious upbringing?

Camilo Vila: I was an alter boy, but I have always been fascinated by the esoteric. I dabbled for a while in esoteric themes. That always fascinated me. I love The Exorcist. I love The Omen.  I love Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. My movie was literally in that genre. It was one of those, but they made it into a gory movie.

Jason Bene: The church in the picture is very creepy and one that I would not visit on Sundays. Was it your intention to flip the traditional look and add an ominous touch to it?

Camilo Vila: That was done on purpose. We shot it on a sound stage in Miami, but we took photographs of a church in New Orleans. It turned out to be pretty close to the church in New Orleans. I can’t remember the name of the church, but we did find one.

Jason Bene: The cinematogrpahy is lite very well and has a European flavor to it. Was that a stylistic choice on your part?

Camilo Vila: That was done on purpose. As a matter of fact, he is the same director of photography [Henry Vargas] that I used in my new film [The City of Gardens]. The producers and Vestron used that to take the movie away from me. They said, “I had made a very European and religious movie.” That was true. He accused me of something that was true. I feel like my movie was more like Rosemary’s Baby. If you look at Rosemary’s Baby it is a little bit of a European movie. They wanted a more bloody movie.

Jason Bene: I can tell what you did was more of a 60′s/70′s moody piece that was about suspense. What was added was more of the 80′s make-up effects and splatter that was popular at the time.

Camilo Vila: When the priest goes over the ledge, they put a flash of the monster and that killed the whole movie because at that point you know there is something supernatural. I didn’t want to show the supernatural until the end of the movie. There is a lot of dialogue that is still in the movie, but it has no meaning anymore because the audience knows who did it.

Jason Bene: Was the man who gets gutted and hung upside down from the cross in your version?

Camilo Vila: That’s mine. What I did was little by little I showed  there was something going on with Father Michael because he didn’t believe in the supernatural. He thought the guy from the bar was the murderer and then something supernatural happens then he finally accepts that there is evil and he says, “Dear God, what is it you will have me do?” Then he goes back to the old priest played by Trevor Howard and he tells him, “There is a real demon.” I interviewed a Jesuit priest that had done exorcisms and I had to get clearance with the Bishop of Miami. This priest had known the real priest in the real case that The Exorcistwas based on. One of the things they tried to do with the exorcism is find out the name of the demon because once you you know its name you have power over it. I called it Daesidarius, the demon of desire, and he told me that’s actually a real name. I learned a lot by interviewing this priest.

Jason Bene: I could be wrong, but I believe The Unholy was Trevor Howard’s last film.

Camilo Vila: I don’t know if that is accurate. Somebody told me that he went on to do a movie in South Africa afterwards. I am not sure if that is correct. If it is not the last it is the one before the last.

Jason Bene: Because his character is blind he has white eyes. I don’t know if you have ever seen the movie The Sentinel where John Carradine plays a blind priest who guards the portal to Hell in an apartment complex. Were you influenced by that movie?

Camilo Vila: Oh, yeah. I love that movie. That’s another movie that I really liked. I do recall being aware of it and I love that movie.

Jason Bene: I am a huge fan of The Fog and you have Hal Holbrook, who played Father Malone in the John Carpenter film, starring as Archbishop Mosely.

Camilo Vila: I am not aware of The Fog. When did it come out?

Jason Bene: It came out in 1980.

Camilo Vila: I tell you that was coincidence. The Fog is not a movie that I remember having an impact with me. The Sentinel definitely did. I saw it when it first came out and it was so powerful. I don’t remember thinking about that movie. That movie may have subconsciously influenced me. When you talk about the photography the movie that I thought about the most was Blade Runner. I remember we looked at Blade Runner and we loved the visuals of that movie. We were fans of it. I remember saying, “I want to bring a little bit of that into the movie.”

Jason Bene: The Unholy tempts man with the one thing we desire the most, a woman. I don’t know how long I would last as a priest. I would have probably been killed in two seconds.

Camilo Vila: [Laughs] John Dykstra and I had a conversation after we were out of the movie and licking our wounds. [Unexplained long pause]. Maybe us getting cut off on the phone is supernatural.

Jason Bene: I think there is somebody who doesn’t want us to talk about this film.

Camilo Vila: When I went to the Bishop to get his permission to meet the priest he said to me as I was leaving, “I am only going to tell you one thing. What you are doing is sanctity, it’s reality, be careful.”

Jason Bene: A lot of films that show the devil for what and who he really is have had bad things occur on the set. Did anything happen on The Unholy?

Camilo Vila: We had a lot of production problems, but nothing weird or anything. We had a lot of problems, but nothing that you could say was supernatural. On my next movie [Options] an assistant cameraman got killed by an African elephant. Maybe it crossed over to my other movie. That was really horrible and a terrible tragedy.

Jason Bene: Before we lost our connection you were talking about how you and John Dykstra were licking your wounds.

Camilo Vila: We agreed that after he pushes the demon away and he was able to overcome the temptation of the flesh it should have been about tempting his ego.

Jason Bene: When The Unholy came out in 1988 you had said, “This is not a horror film.” Do you still feel that way?

Camilo Vila:I don’t know who said that. My movie was not a horror movie, but the one that came out is a horror movie. The movie that came out and was recut is definitely a horror movie.

Jason Bene: I wanted to let you know that although The Unholy is not available on DVD, it is airing on-demand from Lionsgate on You Tube.

Camilo Vila: I didn’t know that. Is the quality good?

Jason Bene: It is great. I watched it last night and it is DVD quality.

Camilo Vila: Thank you! I did not know that. I bought it on Laserdisc and it came from China.

Camilo Vila is currently putting the finishing touches on his new film, The City of Gardens, which deals with a young California surfer who has to grow up in a hurry when he is thrown into a Peruvian political prison in 1980.