Deadly Blessing

Deadly Blessing (1981)

Pray you're not blessed.

When a former member of a religious cult dies in a mysterious accident, Martha, who now lives alone and close to the cult's church, begins to fear for her life and the lives of her visiting friends.

Date of release
1981-08-14
TMDB
5.5 / 10 (214)
Runtime
1h 44m
Genres
Horror, Mystery
Director
Wes Craven

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 0 · Nominations: 1

Deadly Blessing is a 1981 American supernatural slasher film directed by Wes Craven and starring Maren Jensen, Susan Buckner, Sharon Stone, Jeff East, and Ernest Borgnine. The film tells the story of a strange figure committing murder in a contemporary farming community adjacent to a religious sect that believes in ancient evil and curses.

Production

After directing the television horror film Stranger in Our House (1978) under producer Max Keller, Wes Craven was offered to assist in rewrites on Keller's subsequent project, Deadly Blessing. Keller had been impressed by Craven's impromptu rewrites during the filming of Stranger in Our House. The original screenplay for Deadly Blessing had been cowritten by Glenn M. Benest, who had also cowritten Stranger in Our House.

Deadly Blessing was filmed on location in Dallas, Ennis, and Waxahachie, Texas. Filming began on November 10, 1980, with a projected completion date of December 22, 1980. Ernest Borgnine took a brief hiatus from filming after being thrown from a horse-drawn buggy and injuring his back.

According to Craven, as the film marked his first feature for a major studio, he sought to create a more glossy and professional film: "I wanted a big, smooth, sort of Philip Wylie look to it. We very consciously went in with that intention. Robert Jessup, the cinematographer, and I went to Philip Wylie's books and Van Gogh's paintings for the looks of the house down the lane and the young woman's paintings."

Special effects for the incubus entity that appears at the end of the film were originally going to be designed by John Dykstra, but after Dykstra was forced to drop out of the project due to his obligations on Firefox (1982), Everett Alson and Ira Anderson replaced him.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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