Wes Craven’s fifth film (after The Last House on the Left (1972), the porn film The Fireworks Woman (1975), The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and the television film Stranger in Our House/Summer of Fear (1978)), arguably his only contribution to “folk horror” (“the field is all”), has long been regarded as one of his lesser films, merely a staging post en route to the breakthrough success of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). But aside from a ridiculous studio-imposed epilogue it’s rather good and certainly of a piece with his earlier work – it’s not as savage as Last House or Hills, but like those films it pits two opposing groups – one relatively cultured, the other, in this case, a rabidly religious Hittite community – against each other in the middle of nowhere.

Martha (Maren Jensen, fresh from the set of TV’s Battlestar Galactica (1978-1979)) and Jim Schmidt (Douglas Barr) live on an isolated farm named “Our Blessing” neighbouring the land owned by the Hittites, a strict religious community (“the Hittites make the Amish look like swingers”) from which Jim has defected. His father Isaiah (Ernest Borgnine in a beard that frequently looks like it’s clinging to his chin for dear life) is the authoritarian leader of the sect, refusing any contact with outsiders, only reluctantly venturing out to attend Jim’ funeral after he’s been killed in a mysterious tractor accident in his barn. The community consider Martha to be an incubus who lured Jim from the straight and narrow and she has to take comfort in her friends from her old life in the city, Lana Marcus (Sharon Stone in her first substantial role) and Vicky Anderson (Susan Buckner) who are trying to persuade her to return with them to Los Angeles. more deaths and strange occurrences happen around the farm – Hittite William Gluntz (Michael Berryman returning from The Hills Have Eyes) is stabbed to death near the barn by a figure dressed in black, Lana is nearly trapped in the same barn by the same killer, Jim’s brother John (Jeff East) is beaten by his father and exiled when he begins an affair with Vicky, and both are subsequently murdered. Lana is beset by powerful and disturbing dreams, Martha discovers that Jim’s grave has been desecrated and John’s estranged fiancée Melissa (Colleen Riley) turns up reciting a ritual of exorcism. The identity of the killer is revealed in a twist that doesn’t really work before Lana returns to LA and Martha has a nasty encounter in the barn…

A silly last-minute reveal that the incubus is real and comes bursting through the floor of the barn to grab at Martha, a revelation that makes absolutely no sense given what else is going on in the film – like a lot of things here, it’s a scene similar in intent to the one that closes A Nightmare on Elm Street – leaves things on a sour note, but otherwise this is a decent enough effort. The gorgeous photography of the chilly autumnal settings (production took place from November 1980 in Waxahachie, Texas) by Robert Jessup, a refugee from the no-budget world of Larry Buchanan, helps no end, ensuring that no matter what else is going on, Deadly Blessing always looks lovely.

The story can be a bit confusing at times – there’s a late-in-the-day twist regarding the real identity of the killer that stretches credulity to the max – but there’s certainly much of interest. Craven tips his hat to Psycho (1960) by killing off early a character who feels like they might have been the lead and where Last House had pitted ruthless, low-life sex criminals against a supposedly urbane middle class couple and Hills had thrown city slickers into a desert world populated by inbred mutants, Deadly Blessing takes a more interesting tack with its religious patriarchy being stood up to by a group of defiant young women.

The set-pieces are as good as anything that Craven had created so far – a nightmare involving a spider falling into Sharon Stone’s mouth and a snake in a bathtub (another scene that would get reworked for A Nightmare on Elm Street) being the best of them. It could be argued, with some justification, that there’s very little of substance going on between these set pieces and while Craven generates a good amount of suspense and cleverly spends much time painting the Hittites as the villains before revealing that they’re being played every bit as much as the women, his script isn’t as focussed as those of his early genre films. That said, it’s a fine-looking film, the story may wobble about in search of coherence but it’s never dull and there are decent turns from Jensen, Borgnine and Berryman in particular.

Craven would follow Deadly Blessing with the disappointing comic book adaptation, Swamp Thing (1982) and whispers abounded that the once innovative and uncompromising director had lost his way, that the savagery that had informed The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes had gone. Then he made A Nightmare on Elm Street, a film which revitalised the flagging slasher genre, nudging it into new territory, made Robert Englund a genre star and gave birth to a lengthy franchise. Craven’s career would notoriously bounce around all over the place, the pillars of the 70s films, Elm Street, The People Under the Stairs (1991) and Scream (1996) supporting an awful lot of less interesting work (does anyone really care about Deadly Friend (1986), Shocker (1989) or Vampire in Brooklyn (1995) any more? Did they ever?) time has been kind to Deadly Blessing. It’s a very long way from his best work, but it’s certainly not as bad as is often painted.