Alfred Sole had a fascinating, if brief, career as a film director. He started out in pornography, shooting Deep Sleep in 1973, an experience which had led to him being arrested and investigated by the FBI (the whole sorry story is detailed in the invaluable but very definitely not safe for work Rialto Report which has done much sterling work to catalogue the “golden age” of American adult cinema). Inspired by Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), he distracted himself by setting about writing a horror film rooted in Catholicism with English doctoral student Rosemary Ritvo. The result, originally shown as Communion but variously released as Alice, Sweet Alice, The Mask Murders and Holy Terror, proved to be a remarkable early slasher, influenced as much by the Italian gialli as by Roeg.

The setting is the Paterson district on New Jersey in 1961, where divorcee Catherine Spages (Linda Miller) raises her two daughters, nine-year-old Karen (Brooke Shields, 11-years-old at the time and making her film debut) and the precocious twelve-year-old Alice (Paula Sheppard), “a weird little girl” with guidance from their priest Father Tom (Rudolph Willrich). For her first communion, Karen is given his father’s crucifix by Father Tom, which enrages the jealous Alice, She dons a translucent mask, frightens Father Tom’s housekeeper, Mrs Tredoni (Mildred Clinton) and terrorises Karen. On the day of her communion, Karen is shockingly strangled to death by a diminutive figure in the same translucent mask and a yellow raincoat, her body stashed in a storage chest and set alight. Catherine’s grieving ex-husband Dominick (Miles McMaster) starts to investigate the killing alongside the more formal investigations of Detective Spina (Michael Hardstark), while Catherine’s sister Annie (Jane Lowry) moves in to help, much to Alice’s disgust. Alice narrowly escapes being molested by her morbidly obese landlord Mr Alphonso (Alphonso DeNoble) and Annie is attacked by the masked figure. She later claims that it was Alice that tried to kill her, and the girl is sent to a psychiatric institution for evaluation. But the killer is in fact the insane Mrs Tredoni, who murders Dominick and Mr Alphonso before setting her sights on Father Tom…

Communion wasn’t always given its proper due when it was first released. Many critics were impressed but there were enough naysayers to plant unwarranted doubts in the mind of filmgoers still to make up their minds and indeed some who recoiled in horror from the film’s linking of Catholicism and homicidal mania and its use of children in key roles. And certainly, it’s strong stuff, the murder of Karen being particularly shocking and much blood is spilled elsewhere, the murders brutal, nasty and frequently accompanied by stabbing, Psychoesque strings courtesy of composer Stephen J. Lawrence. Its reputation wasn’t helped much by a mix up at the United States Copyright Office leading to it falling into the public domain. Re-releases under various titles and of various degrees of completeness sought to sell the film on the strength of Shields, who had achieved a degree of fame in the wake of Pretty Baby in 1978 and The Blue Lagoon in 1980, despite barely being in it at all, which did the film few favours. In the UK, its video release briefly fell afoul of the “video nasties” furore and it disappeared from sight here for many years.

But over time, its many and varied charms have become clearer and today the film enjoys a thoroughly well-deserved cult following. After the Deep Sleep incident, Sole, who had been raised a Catholic, was formally excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Diocese of Paterson and one can’t help but wonder just how much of the film’s anti-clerical stance that upset some critics. Linda Gross of The Los Angeles Times complained of its “sneering depiction of the Catholic Church” while tom McElfresh of The Cincinnati Enquirer lashed out at the “sexual innuendo and rage at the Catholic church.” But it’s just part of why the film is so fascinating today. It was clearly a project of some importance to Sole, and there’s an easily discernible and very personal anger running through the violence and mayhem.

The more sensitive critic might have been upset too by Sole and Ritvo making Alice such an ambiguous character. For a good chunk of the film, we’re led to believe that she really is, or at least could be, the killer, an angry and jealous pubescent girl reacting with disproportionate violence to the attention her younger sibling is getting. Twenty minutes from the end, we’re told the truth, but Alice is surrounded by perverts, predatory men in positions of authority, and we’re never really sure just how damaged she’s been by her appalling experiences. At the fade out, we might be seeing the birth of a killer as she wanders away from the mortally wounded Father Tom, blank-eyed, with Mrs Tredoni’s blood-stained murder weapon concealed in a bag. There’s no redemption for Alice and indeed her experiences with the church might just have done her far more harm than good. The final few minutes are chilling in their implications and Communion boasts one of the most unsettling climaxes in 70s horror.

Sheppard is very good as Alice. She was actually a college student at the time of shooting, turning 19 while the film was in production, put sells the idea that she’s just 12 rather better than one might have expected. She only made one other film, appearing as Adrian in Slava Tsukerman’s wonderfully odd science fiction film Liquid Sky (1982). Shields of course went on to bigger things and Sole had originally wanted Geraldine Page to play her killer before settling on Mildred Clinton, later a regular in the films of Spike Lee.

Sole wasn’t a prolific director. After Communion, he directed the strange fantasy film Tanya’s Island (1980), slasher spoof Pandemonium (1982) and the television film Cheeseball Presents (1984), wrote some television films and episodes and then moved into production design where he spent the rest of his career. He died in 2022 at the age of 78 and if nothing else he should be remembered fondly for Communion, a fascinating, gory and somewhat prophetic film that anticipated some of what was to make the slasher movie so popular just a couple of years later. In 2007, there came the news, greeted with the weary sigh of inevitability, that a remake was in the works, to be directed by Dante Tomaselli, but funding couldn’t be found and the film has, thus far, failed to appear.