I often think about the 1979 Italian sci-fi horror film The Visitor
What is it? What's happening? Where are we?
Some folks ponder the meaning of life, or, more specifically, our place in the universe, what happens when we die, if everything that happens in the world is controlled by a race of underground humanoid lizards, and other things that cannot be answered, because they’re beyond our comprehension
I often think about the 1979 Italian sci-fi horror film The Visitor.
If you’re wondering if you’ve ever seen The Visitor, you haven’t. It’s simply impossible to watch something this baffling and not remember it later. Such an experience is burned into your brain forever, like your first kiss. I remember it specifically because it feels like something I merely hallucinated, an elliptical dream that contains some secret message I’ve yet to find. My ongoing quest to understand The Visitor is not dissimilar to my approach to high school algebra, in that as dense and unknowable as it seems, maybe sometime out of nowhere, something will click and it will suddenly all make sense. That never happened for algebra, however, and it hasn’t happened yet for The Visitor either.
Explaining what The Visitor is about is like trying to explain modern art, in that literally any interpretation of it is correct. It’s a little Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and a lot The Omen, except here, instead of God and Satan, the battle between good and evil is represented by the benevolent Yahweh and the malevolent Zatteen, a name that sounds like it was chosen to avoid copyright infringement. Franco Nero, an intergalactic Christ figure with Roger Daltrey in Tommy hair, and surrounded by a passel of pale bald children, is informed by Jerzy Colsowicz (John Huston) that–
Now, I imagine you’re thinking “Wait a minute, the John Huston?” Yes, the John Huston, and when you watch him doddering around with an expression on his face like he’s trying to comprehend a diner menu, painstakingly walking up and down endless flights of stairs, and engaging in the world’s slowest foot chase, you’ll wonder if perhaps elder abuse was taking place during filming. Yet, this was the same year that Huston directed Wise Blood, and a full six years before he directed Prizzi’s Honor, so it seems unlikely that he was unaware of what he was doing when he agreed to star in The Visitor. It would appear that he was told by director Michael J. Paradise to look perpetually lost and befuddled on purpose, even though he’s also supposed to be the only character who knows what’s happening. Other normally respected Hollywood icons who either desperately needed money to pay off gambling debts or were looking for a free trip to Italy include Glenn Ford, Sam Peckinpah, and Shelley Winters, whose character sings “Shortnin’ Bread.” Twice.
ANYWAY, Jerzy Colsowicz informs Space Jesus that a cabal of Satanists on Earth are plotting the rebirth of Zatteen, by way of a little girl in Atlanta named Katy Collins, and he’s directed to observe her. It’s unclear if Jerzy himself is an alien, or an Earthling working as Space Jesus’s emissary, but for whatever reason he travels to Earth under a Polish passport, and tells an airport customs agent, in the most generic Midwestern American accent possible, that it’s his first time traveling in the United States. One might assume this means that Huston was not the first (or even the tenth) choice to play Jerzy, but, considering it’s merely one of the hundreds of inexplicable things that happen in The Visitor, it could also be entirely intentional. That’s the beautiful thing about it: both of those theories could be correct.
Katy Collins is eight years old, or so we’re told. I say this because the actress playing Katy, Paige Conner1, looks like she’s about to start middle school. It doesn’t help that, when we’re introduced to Katy, she appears to be doing Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver cosplay, with her hair sprayed into Farrah Fawcett wings and wearing sunglasses that take up roughly half the size of her face. She makes eyes at a basketball player, who reacts to it with mild confusion at best. Get used to that, because “mild confusion” is how everyone reacts to the increasingly bizarre things that happen in The Visitor, whether it’s a child “accidentally” shooting her mother at a birthday party, or a basketball hoop spontaneously exploding.
Said mildly confused basketball player plays for a team owned by Katy’s mother’s boyfriend (Lance Henriksen), who’s apparently sold his soul to Satan–sorry, Zatteen–for a championship, and is instrumental in the plot to reincarnate him into a human child. Katy’s mother, Barbara (Joanne Nail), is blissfully unaware that her boyfriend worships a Devil-like being, or that he plans to use her as a vessel to bring on the Burlington Coat Factory version of the Antichrist, or that her daughter is possessed (maybe? I guess?) by a malevolent being beyond our world.
This is odd, because, unlike a lot of “possessed kid” movies, Katy makes no attempt to hide that she’s cooking with evil gas. Either smirking or sneering the entire time, Katy cusses out adults in a thick-as-grits Southern accent that no one else has, and loves nothing more than tormenting Barbara, even after she’s paralyzed and ends up in a wheelchair. Luciano Comici and Robert Mundi’s script (if you want to call it that) does away with any pretense of the audience being misled by Katy being a cute, even angelic little kid, a la Damien Thorne. She’s a horrid little turd from the moment she appears on screen, and there aren’t enough sacred Daggers of Megiddo or whatever to satisfyingly take her out.
You know what, let’s stop for a moment. I’m already at almost 1,000 words and haven’t even gotten into what happens in the movie. If I were to try to explain the “plot” (such as it is) beat by beat, I’d be here until St. Swithin’s Day. This would qualify as an academic paper based on word count alone. And again, even if I were to go into intricate detail over how we get from Point A (Space Jesus sends a Polish guy to Earth to watch over a demonically possessed little girl) to Point B (a bird kills Lance Henriksen with a switchblade), it still would not make a lick of sense. Even without mentioning the orbs descending from outer space, the interpretive dancing, the hall of mirrors, the haunted bejeweled bird figurine, and the giant Pong game in Katy’s house, it would sound like the rantings of a lunatic. Trying to make sense of The Visitor is like watching someone play a game of 52 Pick-Up, except that instead of cards, it’s script pages.
So instead, I will limit myself to two scenes that, for me, best illustrate its gleefully insane tone. I rewatch them occasionally, parsing them like the Zapruder film, and still, I can make no rhyme or reason of them. First is Katy’s birthday party, where she wears three different and conflicting hairstyles at the same time. She unwraps a gift, in which someone (???) has replaced (???) the item that was originally in there with a loaded gun, and which everyone at the party reacts to as if Katy has received a pair of novelty socks. Katy casually tosses the gun towards Barbara with a cheerful “Mommy, look!” and it somehow goes off by itself, hitting Barbara in the back. As anyone would, Katy reacts to accidentally shooting her mother with a “whoopsie!” expression, as if she bumped into someone and got her chocolate in their peanut butter.
The only character remotely concerned with how the gun got there is detective Glenn Ford, and he’s almost immediately killed for his trouble. The incident is never mentioned again.
Later, Katy, an 8-year-old who is allowed to roam around the greater Atlanta metropolitan area unsupervised, goes to an ice rink, where she engages in what can only be described as a “skate-off” with a group of older boys. She doesn’t skate with them so much as slam them into walls and send them skidding across the ice, and when two of the boys grab her by the hands, she spins them with such velocity that they’re flung across the entire length of the skating rink and into the front window of a nearby restaurant. Meanwhile, at the rink and also 500 miles away at the same time, Jerzy slowly makes his way both up, and down a staircase that appears to have been designed by M.C. Escher, and eventually watches what’s happening2 with a look on his face that says “The bus schedule said 3:15 and it’s 3:22.”
“Wow, did those boys die?” you may be asking. Well, who can say, the scene immediately cuts to Katy and Jerzy playing Pong together, and the incident is never mentioned again.
I chose these scenes both because they’re deliriously strange, and because they’re examples of how nothing that happens in one scene connects in any meaningful way to any other scene. They just end, and everything that occurs in them are immediately forgotten by the characters. If you watch it hoping that there will ever be an explanation for how a gun got into a wrapped birthday present, you’ll be waiting a long time, because there isn’t one. Nor is there an explanation for who the alien beings are who emerge from a 16-wheeler to kidnap Barbara and presumably impregnate her, or why Barbara has a landline phone in her car, or why the very next scene is some casually racist comic relief involving a pair of Black tow truck drivers. Every conclusion we could possibly make is presumptuous – maybe it was Zatteen who put the gun there, but it’s not certain. Perhaps Shelley Winters also works for Space Jesus, but who can say for sure. Possibly it’s Jerzy who kills the Satanic (Zatteenic?) board of directors orchestrating everything (I guess?) but it’s not clear. Any interpretation is both right, and wrong.
I had hoped that in writing about The Visitor I would gain some insight, a crumb of understanding, but I’m still as much in the dark as I was before. I’m not even sure who the titular visitor is – I can only assume it’s Jerzy, but I say that because he arrives in the movie via airplane. For all I know, it could be Shelley Winters, who just shows up out of nowhere at Barbara’s house, bearing a cage full of taxidermized birds and offering her services as a housekeeper. At this point, I’m willing to give up the search for answers and concede that The Visitor’s strength is in its incoherence. In an era where cheap sci-fi knockoffs were churned out at the rate of what seemed like three a week, it’s a standout precisely because it’s so bizarre, and so doggedly determined to elude explanation. Why watch boring, derivative trash like Star Crash when you could bend your brain into an L-shape trying to figure out why birds defeat the Antichrist, or why all of this is set to a score that sounds like it came from an episode of Starsky & Hutch?
There is no understanding, there is only acceptance. Hail Zatteen!
Perhaps not surprisingly, Conner eventually left showbiz, became a cheerleader for the Atlanta Falcons, and now runs a business selling eyelash extensions.
For someone whose sole assignment is watching over Katy, Jerzy does virtually nothing to stop her from brutally injuring and possibly killing several people.
It's a fairly reasonable hypothesis that Jerzy is The Visitor, because when he enters the country with his Polish passport, Jerzy says he's just visiting. Odd how little effort it took for him to gain entry, as Poland was an Eastern Bloc country at the time... However, like you said, any interpretation is both right, and wrong.