Oliver Stone is better known now as the director of politically charged mainstream films like Platoon (1986), JFK (1991), Nixon (1995) et al but he dallied with horror early in his career with this peculiar and often very pretentious film. One can only assume that the drugs were particularly strong in Quebec (where the film was shot) in October 1972 (though in the book The Oliver Stone Experience by Matt Zoller Seitz, Stone claims that it was shot in “late ’73”), the only explanation for how strange and incoherent this film really is.

Horror writer Edmund Blackstone (Jonathan Frid) – “the Edgar Allan Poe of modern American fiction” apparently – is struggling to find an ending for his latest book and has started to suffer nightmares about a trio of his macabre characters, a huge black executioner from Russian legend, the Jackal (Henry Judd Baker), the Hindu goddess Kali (Martine Beswick) and a sadistic dwarf named Spider (Hervé Villechaize). As several friends arrive at his remote country home – businessman Charlie Hughes (Joseph Sirola) and his younger wife Mikki (Mary Woronov), playboy DJ Mark Frost (Troy Donohue), Serge Kahn (Roger De Koven), Gerald (Richard Cox) and Eunice Kahn (Anne Meacham) – to join Blackstone and his wife Nicole (Christina Pickles) and young son Jason (Timothy Ousey) the three characters from the writer’s book and dreams suddenly appear and start tormenting the assembled guests. As the party is picked off one-by-one by the intruders things take increasingly surreal turns until it’s all revealed to be another of Blackstone’s nightmares. Or is it?

Stone has all but disowned the film over the years (talking to Mike Fleming Jr of the Deadline website he said that it was a film “which I didn’t much talk about”) and it’s not hard to see why. It’s clearly the work of a desperate young film-maker who had already mapped out part of his future with the short film Last Year in Viet Nam (1971) and was itching to get a film-making career off the ground. It reeks of “trying too hard” and while one doesn’t doubt that Stone had very serious intent here, exactly what he was trying to say is hard to discern. Seizure often feels like sitting in a room with a group of stoned friends trying to make sense of their disconnected ramblings.

It’s a slow and stodgy film, swathes of bickering and philosophical musings interspersed with moments of incoherent weirdness and occasionally effective horror scenes – the initial arrival of the three intruders, whatever they might be (an early mention of three escapees from a psychiatric hospital muddies an already murky script) is particularly well done. But it’s a talky film and that talk is either terribly naïve or painfully pretentious. It’s the sort of film where it’s easier to like the idea of it than to actually enjoy it for what it is. The twist endings (there are three) shouldn’t be too hard to work out though none of them is particularly enlightening.

The cast is by far the most interesting thing about the film and the chief reason to sit through it. A post-Dark Shadows (1966-1971) Jonathan Frid looks startlingly like Harry Dean Stanton at times and a pre-Bond, pre-Fantasy Island (1977-1984) Hervé Villechaize is surprisingly creepy as the sadistic Spider, a far cry from the loveable if annoying Tattoo in the latter (though Stone recalled that the actor threatened to kill him at point in the film’s troubled shoot). Cult stars Mary Woronov and Martine Beswick are the film’s crown jewels, turning in the best performances and making the best possible case for anyone to sit through the rest of this turgid nonsense. There are some bad attempts at humour thanks to the wildly over-acting Joseph Sirola and former rock star and teen pin-up Troy Donahue gets to play up to his public persona as an ageing lothario DJ.

If it’s about anything at all, Seizure may be about the different ways that people react when confronted with their imminent deaths though that may be giving it more credit than it deserves. Each of the characters is menaced at some point by the intruders and each responds differently to the threat – Charlie tries to buy his way out of danger, Eunice throws herself out of a window when she’s prematurely aged, the more sanguine and intellectual Serge talks philosophy and mythology and prepares for death in a spookily calm manner and so on. It’s all well and good but Stone’s script is so muddled that none of it makes any sense at all. After Seizure, Stone found work hard to find, eking out a living as a taxi driver and production runner until he made another short film, Mad Man of Martinique in 1979, the same year that he won an Oscar for his screenplay for Midnight Express (1978). He returned to horror for his second feature film as director, The Hand (1981) which shares some similarities with Seizure. In the later film Michael Cine plays another artist whose creation comes to life to menace him. Later EOFFTV flavoured films include the mystical rock biopic The Doors (1991) and the Quentin Tarantino-scripted Natural Born Killers (1994).