Unsubtle contrasts – old and new, beauty and ugliness – permeate The Sentinel. ‘To this happy place, no evil thing approach or enter in’įollowing an establishing shot of ecclesiastical goings-on in rural Italy (surely obligatory in occult-themed films of the 70s), the action switches to New York’s Central Park. Why is it that I find myself coming back to this film again and again, immersing myself in its familiar malevolence? Scottish film writer Brian Pendreigh is more on my wavelength: he calls it ‘genuinely creepy and arguably underrated’. Okay, I’m not about to argue that The Sentinel is highly original, but to me it is more than mere schlock. In Nightmare Movies, Kim Newman likens the film’s ‘tastelessness and pretension’ to Burnt Offerings (1976), both films described as ‘the dregs of a genre more or less created by Roman Polanski in Repulsion’.

Phil Hardy, in the Aurum Film Encyclopedia, bemoans Winner’s ‘clumsy sensationalism-at-all-costs direction’, calling the film ‘heavy-handed and mechanical’. I know every twist of the plot, every scene, but it still holds my attention. It’s one of those films that I put on when I feel a bit out of sorts and want to watch something comfortingly familiar. It’s not a flawless film by any means, but I love it. It transpires she is to be the next ‘sentinel’, guarding the entrance to Hell that is concealed within the unassuming Brooklyn brownstone. Alison is plagued by eccentric neighbours, unexplained noises, and flashbacks to traumatic events in her past. All is not well at 10 Montague Terrace, however.

The Sentinel’s heroine, model Alison Parker (Cristina Raines), moves into a grand New York apartment to make a fresh start following a suicide attempt. Two or three times a year I watch The Sentinel, the 1977 horror directed by Michael Winner and based on Jeffrey Konvitz’s 1974 novel.

Jeffrey konvitz the sentinel