1975, USA
TV terror titan Dan Curtis – whose film Burnt Offerings is covered elsewhere in this appendix – turned in this terrific horror anthology for ABC’s Movie of the Week series, and although the Richard Matheson-scripted segment ‘Amelia, featuring the pint-sized Zuni fetish doll, is the most beloved of the three tales, it’s the second story, William F. Nolan’s ‘Millicent and Therese’ that bears mentioning here.
Karen Black (the lead in all three stories, as well as in Burnt Offerings) plays both prim, uptight Millicent Larimore and also her promiscuous blonde bombshell sister Therese, who live together in their large family home despite their loathing of one another.
When one of Therese’s suitors comes calling (John Karlen of Curtis’s TV soap Dark Shadows), Millicent tells him that Therese has already ditched him to go to a party, before scathingly informing him of Therese’s foul habits, occult preoccupations and perverse desires in an attempt to scare him off permanently.
But when she starts detailing Therese’s sexual seduction of their father, who was buried only that day, Karlen cuts her short, saying: “Miss Larimore, I’m afraid you’re the one that really needs help.”
George Gaynes (later known for comedy roles in Police Academy and TV’s Punky Brewster) plays the psychiatrist who’s been treating Millicent for many years in an attempt to get her to reconcile with Therese.
However, the ending reveals that this is a textbook case of split personality, in which the child creates a doppelgänger as a means of simultaneously denying and indulging unwanted desires (specifically those directed at her own father).
Using Therese’s own occult texts against her, she makes a voodoo doll in Therese’s likeness and sticks a pin through it – which will turn out to be a suicidal move.
#trilogy of terror #dan curtis #karen
hexafu 