If you’ve ever wondered what it would look like if an Italian filmmaker tried to rip off The Omen, Star Wars, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind simultaneously while high on espresso and fever dreams, you’ll find your answer in the 1979 madness that is The Visitor. This isn't just a movie; it’s a psychedelic artifact of a time when the cinematic rulebook was thrown out the window in favor of pure "vibes" and avian-based violence. The film opens in a blinding white void where an intergalactic warrior named Jerzy—played with a magnificent, weary gravitas by the legendary John Huston—meets a cosmic, bald Christ-figure played by Franco Nero. They are surrounded by dozens of bald children in a scene that looks like a high-fashion cult meeting. They are locked in a multi-dimensional war against "Sateen," an ancient evil force whose genetic legacy is currently manifesting on Earth in the form of a foul-mouthed eight-year-old girl named Katy who lives in Atlanta. It is the kind of opening that tells the audience immediately to abandon any hope of a linear, grounded plot.
Katy is an absolute nightmare of a child, and I don't just mean she's bratty. She is the vessel for a cosmic entity, and she uses her psychic powers to explode basketballs and "accidentally" paralyze her mother, Barbara, with a gift-wrapped handgun during a birthday party. It is one of the most jarring and mean-spirited scenes in seventies genre cinema, establishing Katy as a threat that cannot be reasoned with. Jerzy arrives in Georgia to stop Katy from eventually mating with a future evil sibling to create a super-demon, which is a plot point as wild as it sounds. The movie treats Atlanta as a battleground for the soul of the universe, with glass-and-steel skyscrapers serving as the backdrop for ancient, biblical-tier warfare. The most baffling thing about the film, however, is the cast list. How director Giulio Paradisi managed to assemble this group is the greatest mystery of the seventies. You have Academy Award winners and Hollywood royalty rubbing shoulders with Italian genre veterans, all while a literal army of birds waits in the wings to execute the film's bizarre justice.
John Huston spends most of the movie looking like he’s waiting for a bus to a much better film, yet he brings an eerie, grandfatherly authority to the role of the cosmic peacekeeper. He stands on rooftops and street corners, watching the carnage unfold with a stoic sadness that only a man of his stature could pull off. Meanwhile, Lance Henriksen plays the villainous Raymond Armstead, a corporate creep and owner of a basketball team who is part of a shadowy cabal of men trying to ensure Katy’s "lineage" continues. He spends the movie trying to pressure Barbara into having another child, adding a layer of reproductive horror to the already dense sci-fi plot. Then there is Shelley Winters, who shows up as a Mary Poppins-esque nanny named Jane. She isn't afraid to slap the hell out of the demonic child, providing a grounded, almost comedic grit to the supernatural proceedings. Glenn Ford plays a detective investigating the psychic carnage, looking utterly bewildered as the case moves further away from police work and closer to the apocalypse. Even the smaller roles are filled with interesting faces; you’ll spot Betty Turner in a memorable turn as a receptionist, adding to the surreal "who's who" of the production and providing a brief moment of professional normalcy in a world that is rapidly coming apart at the seams.
Visually, The Visitor is a masterpiece of Italian excess, prioritizing stunning, bizarre imagery over anything resembling coherent storytelling. The cinematography by Ennio Guarnieri is breathtaking, utilizing wide-angle lenses and strange perspectives to make the modern architecture of Atlanta look like an alien landscape. The score by Franco Micalizzi is a funky, disco-infused assault that makes even a scene of Huston walking down a staircase feel like a cosmic event of massive importance. It all builds to a climax that is a masterpiece of low-budget insanity, involving an army of birds—specifically hawks and pigeons—descending upon a penthouse to peck the evil out of the world. The birds act as a sort of celestial cleanup crew, shredding the villains in a flurry of feathers and fake blood. It’s loud, it’s bloody, and it makes absolutely no logical sense, but in the world of seventies Euro-horror, logic is usually for cowards. It’s a movie that feels like it was filmed in a different dimension and beamed onto Earth as a warning, capturing a specific brand of late-seventies paranoia where the suburbs are haunted, the birds are spies, and John Huston is our only hope for galactic peace.
The film is a must-see for anyone who loves high-budget exploitation cinema or just wants to see what happens when the budget for a movie is spent entirely on birds of prey and legendary actors. It’s slow in places and utterly confusing in others, but it is undeniably unique. Whether you call it The Visitor or its original title, Stridulum, it remains one of the most singular experiences in the history of genre film. There is a specific joy in watching a movie that refuses to explain itself, one that assumes the audience is comfortable with the idea of a basketball-playing demi-god child and a galactic council of bald men. It feels like a fever dream you’d have after falling asleep with the TV on during a sci-fi marathon. The film doesn't just ask you to suspend your disbelief; it demands that you shred it and throw it out the window. By the time the credits roll and you've witnessed a bird-led massacre and a final showdown in a cosmic void, you're left staring at the screen in a daze, wondering if what you just watched was a brilliant avant-garde statement on the nature of evil or a total, beautiful car crash. The truth is likely somewhere beautifully in the middle.
Beyond the sheer spectacle, there’s an interesting undercurrent of 1970s anxiety running through the film. It captures the fear of the "bad seed" child that was popular after The Exorcist, but it scales it up to a galactic level. Instead of just a demon in a house, we have an extraterrestrial conspiracy involving real estate and sports franchises. The film seems to suggest that evil isn't just a personal failing, but a corporate and cosmic one. Raymond’s cabal of businessmen represents a cold, calculated interest in the supernatural, wanting to harness Katy’s power for their own gains. This intersection of the mundane and the metaphysical is what makes the movie so fascinatingly weird. You have scenes of corporate boardrooms discussed in the same breath as ancient genetic prophecies. It’s this tonal whiplash—from John Huston’s soulful monologues to Lance Henriksen’s icy stares, to Glenn Ford’s "just-the-facts" detective work—that keeps the movie from ever becoming predictable. It is a work of pure, unadulterated imagination that could only have been born in the transition between the gritty seventies and the neon eighties.
The Visitor stands as a monument to the era of the "international co-production" gone wild. It represents a time when filmmakers could get serious money to make something truly experimental and market it as a mainstream horror movie. It treats its audience like they’re in on the joke, or perhaps like they’re also hallucinating. From the bizarre bird attacks to the disco-theque soundtrack, every choice is dialed up to eleven. It’s the perfect movie for a midnight screening with a crowd that’s ready to embrace the absurdity. It’s a film that lingers in the mind not because of its plot, but because of its texture—the sound of the drums, the sight of Huston’s umbrella, and the terrifyingly cold eyes of a child who just wants to see the world burn. It’s a one-of-a-kind cinematic trip that everyone should take at least once, if only to see Betty Turner and the rest of this incredible cast try to survive the cosmic bird-pocalypse.
If you’re ready to own this slice of cosmic insanity, the Arrow Films 4K Ultra HD Limited Edition is the only way to go. They’ve given the 109-minute European version a brand new 4K restoration from the original 35mm camera negative, and seeing this fever dream in Dolby Vision is like having your retinas scrubbed by a galactic council. The colors pop with a surreal intensity, and the original lossless mono audio ensures that funky, driving score hits you right in the chest. It’s the crispest the "bird-pocalypse" has ever looked, and honestly, the film’s bizarre architecture and psychedelic voids deserve this kind of high-fidelity treatment.
The bonus features are just as curated and wild as the movie itself. You get a brand new commentary by critics BJ and Harmony Colangelo, who are perfect guides through this narrative labyrinth, plus visual essays by Meagan Navarro and Willow Catelyn Maclay that try to make sense of the film's biblical and bodily themes. The archive interviews are a goldmine, too—hearing Lance Henriksen, Lou Comici, and Ennio Guarnieri talk about the production is like hearing dispatches from a beautiful, confused frontline. Throw in a collectors’ booklet and that reversible sleeve with new Erik Buckham artwork, and you’ve got a physical release that treats this cult classic like the high-art madness it truly is.
The Visitor is available to own today! If you order from MVD you can save 35% off the retail price!!!
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