Extremely R-Rated 80s Supernatural Thriller Forces You Into The Ultimate Sacrifice

By Robert Scucci
| Published 18 seconds ago

These days, ritualistic human sacrifices for harvest have all but been written off for the exact reasons you’d expect, but 1987’s The Believers suggests that such rituals are still actively carried out in the most unassuming of modern places if the conditions are just right. In this case, a psychologist’s son becomes the primary target of malevolent forces ahead of the summer solstice, and then there’s a lot of supernatural junk science that kind of gives you an idea of what sort of dark magic is being used, but in the most scatterbrained way you could imagine.

While an ambitious film that’s billed as horror but plays more like a procedural crime thriller with a supernatural bent, The Believers is a bit of a mess. But if you’re a genre fan, there are some genuinely great moments to take in, whether you find the film’s buildup, blowout, and resolution satisfying or not. At least for my money, spiders crawling out of a woman’s face rank pretty high on my ick list.

No Use Crying Over Spilled Milk

The Believers has one of those openings that will live rent-free in your mind for the rest of your life. First, we get a sizzle reel of tribal civilizations engaging in supernatural rituals to let us know this will come into play later, because otherwise, why start the movie that way? But that’s not what we’re here for. Instead, we’re introduced to psychologist Cal Jamison (Martin Sheen), his son Chris (Harley Cross), and his soon-to-be-dead wife, Lisa (Janet-Laine Green).

Everything’s fine for about a minute until a freak accident involving spilled milk and an overflowing coffee pot electrocutes Lisa to death, leading Cal and Chris to move from Minneapolis, Minnesota, to New York City, where the recently widowed father takes a job as a police psychologist. They move into a new apartment, where housekeeper and nanny Carmen (Carla Pinza) keeps a watchful eye on Chris, allowing Cal to eventually move on and start dating his silver medal, Jessica (Helen Shaver).

It’s around this time that everything starts going off the rails for Cal and his family. His first significant patient comes in the form of Tom Lopez (Jimmy Smits), who rants and raves about a Hispanic cult he knows about and how their version of brujeria is being carried out by a mysterious leader. Meanwhile, bodies are found all over the city, each seemingly murdered with a similar M.O. involving some sort of malevolent dark magic.

Tom’s revelations and, shortly afterward, his brutal, untimely death make Cal rightfully paranoid, clouding his judgment. Carmen, for example, gets caught performing a protection ritual on Chris, leading Cal to believe she’s part of the cult that’s abducting citizens and brutalizing them before dumping them around makeshift altars where they’re later found by authorities. Working with Tom’s friend, Oscar (Raul Davila), Cal surmises that Chris may be abducted and sacrificed in just a few days when the summer solstice arrives, forcing him to rely on his intuition to find the culprits behind this madness and save his son before it’s too late.

Great Overall Story, But Such A Trainwreck

The Believers is one of those movies where the whole is less than the sum of its parts. At least to me, it feels like writer Mark Frost and director John Schlesinger reached into a hat filled with various occult rituals they wanted to try out and simply ran with whatever they pulled. None of this mysticism or dark magic is ever fully explained, which normally works in a film’s favor. In this case, however, I felt like, in order to sell this grab bag of chants and incantations, there needed to be one central mythology we could latch onto instead of watching the film throw everything at the wall to see what sticks.

Martin Sheen and Harley Cross make a convincing father-and-son duo, and their best moments come from simply living through their grief. There’s a great sequence in the middle of the film involving Cal and Chris getting into it over where Jessica fits into their lives now that Lisa has passed away, and moments like this ground the film in ways that totally pay off by the time you get to the third act, when this whole thing goes completely batsh*t and a bunch of spiders explode out of Jessica’s face as the evil, unknown forces reach their most volatile.

If you’re a genre fan, The Believers is one of those movies you should at least be aware of. There are a lot of genuinely unnerving scenes here, but you also have to work through some not-so-great moments before everybody starts firing on all cylinders. When they do, you’ll wish you were in good company while watching the scenes that land, because the visuals can be genuinely upsetting in the best kind of way.

As of this writing, The Believers is streaming for free on Tubi.