Lois
Duncan’s YA horror novels are a perfect example of the cyclical nature of book
publishing. They were big hits when originally published in the 1970s and they
were so perfectly suited to the current boom in teen horror, her publisher
reissued key backlist titles with modernized text. Duncan’s sales also
benefited from the hit movie adaptation of I
Know What You Did Last Summer and its sequels, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, and Damn It, What You Did Two Summers Ago Still Pisses Me Off. However,
horror auteur Wes Craven got first crack at Duncan’s oeuvre with the TV movie Summer of Fear (trailer here), which is now available on DVD and BluRay,
from Doppelganger Releasing.
Before
her orphaned cousin Julia Trent came to live with her family, Rachel Bryant lived
a nearly idyllic life for an American teen. She got along freakishly well with
her parents, had an attentive boyfriend, and was the odds-on-favorite to win
the country club’s equestrian tournament. Strangely, her horse Sundance does
not take to Trent when she arrives, for reasons Bryant will understand soon
enough.
Before
long, Trent steals away Bryant’s boyfriend and causes an accident that fatally
breaks Sundance’s leg. How does she do that? Witchcraft. Bryant can see the
remnants of it in the room they share, but proving it will be a trickier
matter. She gets some sage advice from their neighbor, Prof. Jarvis, an expert
in folklore’s darker manifestations, but that puts the kindly old man in Trent’s
crosshairs.
It
turns out witches cannot be photographed, much like vampires. Too bad they didn’t
have cameras make during the time of the Salem Witch Trials, because they could
have saved a lot of trouble. Bryant also might have made things easier for herself
if she had bought a Polaroid instant camera, but whatever.
Summer of Fear has a reputation
for being a diamond in the rough, because it combines the talents of Wes
Craven, less than one year after The
Hills Have Eyes, and Linda Blair playing Bryant five years after The Exorcist, in the first screen
adaptation of Duncan’s work. Logic dictates it must be great, but it is really
just a fairly typical TV movie.
Granted,
the general level of performance is far superior to what you’d commonly find in
that era’s movies-of-the-week. Blair is appealingly forceful, while Lee Purcell
is eerily seductive and insidious as Trent. They also look somewhat similar,
which makes it all creepier. Summer is
additionally notable as the television debut of Fran “The Nanny” Drescher, who
does indeed show quite promising energy and presence as Bryant’s bestie, nurse-in-training,
Carolyn Baker.
