Nightmare's Balancing Act - THE APPOINTMENT (1981)

Horror has long been a genre for hopeful directors to get some moviemaking experience in before going on to "better things", mostly because horror movies can be maid cheaply and are almost guaranteed to make money, and if there's a movie you don't want to lose money it's the first one you get out of the gate.  The lineage of directors who got their start in horror includes such luminaries as Francis Ford Coppola (Dementia 13) and Oliver Stone (Seizure), but not all of them made the leap, such as Carnival of Souls director Herk Harvey.  While Harvey had a steady career he returned to and has resurfaced for interviews and retrospectives, Lindsey C. Vickers, director of The Appointment (1981), only had a couple more appearances working for Channel 4 and then disappeared completely, his sole feature film languishing in obscurity.  I first saw The Appointment a few years ago and was completely floored - it's one of the most unusual and effective horror movies I've ever seen, and its non-presence among genre fandom is a crime.  Much like Let's Scare Jessica to Death, The Appointment is a film best experienced with as little foreknowledge as possible, but its value is so great it would be worse not to talk about it.

"THREE YEARS AGO"...after a school orchestra rehearsal wraps up a young girl takes a forest shortcut home.  An ominous, classified police report talks about a mysterious disappearance of a teenage girl, and soon enough the girl on screen starts hearing voices and growls from the bushes.  She's suddenly pulled into the trees, and the camera focuses on her smashed violin.  "...THREE YEARS LATER" we see teenager Joanne (Samantha Weysom), the star violinist at the same school, returning home to tell her parents Ian (Edward Woodward) and Dianna (Jane Merrow) about her upcoming violin recital with the orchestra.  Before she gets home she stops by the trail the girl disappeared from, now blocked by a tall iron fence, and talks to someone on the other side which we can't see.  Her Dad Ian has to go out of town for a business trip and will miss the concert, but breaking this news to her is a delicate task.  Joanne is a bit...attached to her father, in a very immature, childish way and perhaps more.  The night before he leaves, Ian and Dianna have a series of unsettling dreams, and rottweilers mysteriously make their way into their house and strange things happen. Ian leaves early the next morning, and what happens on his trip is creepy, surprising and aesthetically fascinating.

While that's not much of a set-up on paper, the horror in The Appointment is drawn out of small details, running symbology, and mounting dread.  The uncomfortable relationship between Ian and Joanna is an odd starting point for a horror movie, and the directions the movie goes with that unspoken truth is magnetically unnerving and wholly unexpected.  It's hard to explain exactly what happens in the movie without wrecking the whole thing because on paper it doesn't look like much happens, but what does happen is some of the most masterful horror moments of the time.  For example, the climax involves a kind of set piece that has shown up in countless other movies, but in Vickers's hands it becomes the most intense, detailed and terrifying example of its type, such an insane sequence that you think the movie wouldn't be able to top it...and then the coda knocks you on your ass.  Edward Woodward is well-loved by horror fans for his impassioned performance in Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man, and his performance in The Appointment is a fine compliment, his arc a composed, practical man being sucked into a vortex of mystery and terror.  Jane Merrow as Dianna isn't in much of the movie, but her role is essential and her performance is perfectly placed.  I can't say that Samantha Weysom, who plays Joanne, is any great shakes, but she was a teenager and the film was a small production, and it can be counted among the film's few faults.


The movie is really built upon its production, a brilliant combination of cinematography, music, editing, sound design and pacing that shows an enormous talent in Vickers.  If any of these things was out of place the mood would have broken and the audience would have immediately been taken out of the story.  It's so skillfully made that I'm very frustrated that Vickers dropped off the face of the Earth.  Unable to secure theatrical distribution due to its confusing structure and defiance of horror tropes, The Appointment was quietly dumped onto video (3M Video in England, Sony Video Software in America) and has never been reissued in any form.  Vickers later did work at the BBC, producing the miniseries Zastrozzi: A Romance (based upon a novel by Percy Shelley) and co-producing the Aardman short Babylon (directed by Peter Lord and David Sproxton, both behind Chicken Run and Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were Rabbit), both in 1986.  The only other credit is The Lake, a 33-minute short film Vickers made in 1978, shot in 11 days for 28,000 pounds and shown in front of screenings of the Chuck Norris movie A Force of One (because lame cop thrillers should always be preceded by atmospheric horror shorts).  I found an article written after a 2012 screening as part of BFI's Flipside festival, and if anybody has a copy of the film or knows where I can find it I'll give them a million Monopoly dollars.


While The Appointment has the good fortune to be a horror movie made in the 80's it's a far cry from the kinds of popcorn flicks that are such a booming cult market today.  It's much more akin to horror practices of the 70's, and in my mind is the last example of a film genre that has never before been defined but needs to be talked about.  I call it Psycho-Aestheticism - films in the genre used psychological and paranoid stories as launching pads for unique horror experiences driven by heightened film technique, symbology and aesthetic intoxication.  Rather than rely on monsters, violence and sleaze, Psycho-Aestheticist movies built dread through sight and sound experiences, banking heavily on mystery and beauty to let the audiences' mind expand upon the film's story and ideas.  I've written about two Psycho-Aestheticist movies before - Let's Scare Jessica to Death and Symptoms - but there are many others (mostly from the mid-60's through the mid-70's), including Roman Polanski's Repulsion, Ingmar Bergman's Hour of the Wolf and Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now.  The 70's was a time of unparalleled freedom for horror directors, as the old studio standards had nearly collapsed and no huge successes had set marketable trends (like Halloween and Friday the 13th would at the end of the decade).  An odd link between these films is how the directors didn't spend much time in the horror genre, instead ducking in to make a film or two and then moving on to other things.  The singular nature of these films could be attributed to that interloping, the filmmakers more concerned with making a movie than a Horror Movie.  That singularity also ensures the difficulty in marketing these movies, and many of them have had neglectful distribution or were simply forgotten about.  For example, look at that idiotic video box at the top of the article.  Not only is the cover chintzy as hell (though endearing in its cheapness, like the box for Ethan) the blurb on the back is extremely misleading and was probably written by somebody who'd never seen the movie.  

I'll cover a few more Psycho-Aestheticist movies in the future (*cough* Images *cough*), suffice to say that none of them were made any later than The Appointment.  The genre film landscape changed dramatically in the 80's, with horror a more codified industry and distributors more conservative, and a fright flick that emphasized slow burn atmosphere over violence didn't stand a chance.  Heck, this movie didn't stand a chance, and it's high time it got a DVD release or at least showed up at a festival or two.  I've watched it several times now and every time I find some new detail to admire, and while I think I've got a pretty good idea as to what it all means I'd love to debate with fellow viewers.  It's a movie worth debating, a totally unique horror experiment that holds up just as well today as it did 33 years ago.  If you're worried about having to drop $14 on the ancient VHS, don't worry - somebody thankfully uploaded the whole thing to YouTube.

(This is part 1 of 7; when the video ends find the next part in the "watch next" screen.)

~PNK