Deadly Blessing

Martha and Jim Schmidt live on an isolated Pennsylvania farm named "Our Blessing." Most of their neighbors are "Hittites", an austere religious community led by Jim's father Isaiah Schmidt who forbids any interaction with non-Hittites. After breaking up a fight between one Hittite member, William Gluntz, and another, more artistically minded neighbor, Faith Stohler, Jim finds "incubus" scrawled on the wall of his barn. Later that night, Jim is killed when his tractor suddenly starts up and crushes him against the wall. Isaiah and other Hittites observe Jim's funeral, as he was a lapsed member of their community; they consider Martha to be an incubus for having lured him away from their religion. Martha's friends Lana Marcus and Vicky Anderson visit the farm, hoping to persuade her to return to Los Angeles. While creeping around Our Blessing at night, William is stabbed in the back by a black-dressed figure. The following day, while looking for William, Isaiah offers to buy the farm from Martha, but she angrily refuses. Lana is nearly trapped in the barn by the black-dressed figure. As she escapes, she finds William's corpse hanging from a rope. The Sheriff advises the three friends to leave town, as someone may be after them. However, they decide to stay. When Isaiah finds out that Jim's brother John has been seeing Vicky, he beats then exiles him. John meets Vicky outside the cinema and she lets John drive her car, giving him a sense of freedom. They stop at the side of a road and begin to make out but they are killed by the black-dressed figure. Lana, overwhelmed by disturbing dreams, begins to believe that death is pursuing her. Martha discovers that Jim's grave has been dug up and the casket filled with chickens from the Stohlers' farm. In their barn, she finds Jim's body and an altar to her. John's estranged fiancée Melissa arrives reciting a ritual of exorcism but is attacked by Faith's mother, Louisa. Faith and Louisa, who hate the Hittites, have been the black-dressed figures murdering them. Martha struggles with them and tears open Faith's shirt, revealing her to be a man who has been in love with Martha. They pursue Martha to Our Blessing. There, Lana kills Louisa and a late-arriving Melissa stabs Faith to death. In a religious fervor, Melissa threatens Martha next, but an even-more-late-arriving Isaiah assures her that the messenger of the incubus has already been killed. The day after, Lana returns to Los Angeles. Though Jim's ghost tries to warn her, the incubus bursts through the floor and drags Martha to hell. == Cast ==

Development 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. Filming 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 th project due to his obligations on Firefox (1982), Everett Alson and Ira Anderson replaced him. ==Release==

Universal Pictures, the primary distributor for PolyGram-produced films at the time, chose not to pick up the finished project; it was instead released in theaters by United Artists and was the final United Artists film to be owned by Transamerica Corporation after being acquired by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer on July 28, 1981. United Artists released Deadly Blessing theatrically in the United States on August 14, 1981. On January 22, 2013, Scream Factory released a Collector's Edition of the film on Blu-ray and DVD under license from Universal Studios. In March 2026, Kino Lorber announced a 4K UHD release of the film featuring a new HDR/Dolby Vision master. == Reception ==

Box office The film was a modest box office success, grossing $8,279,042. The Baltimore Sun critic Lou Cedrone praised the film for favoring suspense over violence, and deemed it "relatively respectable" compared to Craven's previous films. Janet Maslin of The New York Times praised Craven's direction, writing that he "has a flair for scaring his audience and an even more useful talent for making his characters comfortable and believable, even under the weirdest circumstances. The performances here are restrained and plausible, even from Mr. Borgnine, who appears in a long beard and a black hat playing someone called Isaiah." Linda Gross of the Los Angeles Times praised the film's themes and religious commentary, editing, music, and cinematography, but faulted it for its "hallucinatory, spaced-out" tone. Time Out wrote, "Deadly Blessing isn't a very good movie, but it holds out distinct promise that Craven will soon be in the front rank of horror filmmakers", calling it "an excellent example of a mundane project elevated into quite a palatable genre movie by its director." Accolades Themes Film scholars and Craven biographers have noted that Deadly Blessing is one of his few films that explores explicit religious themes. Its theme of religious fundamentalism was partly drawn from Craven's own strict Christian upbringing. The film's final sequence, which features the supernatural incubus entity making an appearance, is noted by Craven biographer John Wooley: "With a hard-edged religion-based intolerance on display throughout Deadly Blessing, it's not surprising that some reviewers and critics were uncomfortable with the final scene of the picture, which allows a double-whammy denouement that not only reveals a gender surprise, but also suggests that the deeply unlikeable Isaiah and his hellfire-and-brimstone pronouncements were actually on the right track." In her review of the film upon its theatrical release, The New York Times critic Janet Maslin commented that the film "ought to fascinate students of horror-film morality, because its notions of sin and retribution are so out of the ordinary... This movie also reveals an odd perception of sexual mores. One character's chief transgression appears to have been getting married; another character is punished for not wanting to marry. And the most promiscuous looking person in the story emerges perfectly unscathed at its conclusion." == References ==