Magic (1978) Demonstrates the Difference Between Auteur Horror and Horror Auteurs

Today’s issue of Dust On The VCR is a subscriber request! This spooky selection comes from my comrade Joe Phelps, a college acquaintance of mine who has grown into a genuine friend over the years, which I really appreciate since the inverse is so common. Joe is a fellow creative spirit, which is pretty evident if you’ve ever been to either of his local businesses: the Pilcrow Cocktail Cellar in Downtown Birmingham or Ampersandwich in Avondale. Needless to say, Birmingham is a better place because of Joe, and this newsletter is too. (Also, I really appreciate him embracing the October of it all and assigning me a horror movie I’ve been meaning to watch for years.) Anyway. Want to request a film for a future issue? Subscribe to the paid version!

Reader, I’ve been thinking about The Exorcist a lot lately. Granted, that’s mostly due to William Friedkin’s passing earlier this year and the recent release of The Exorcist: Believer, which technically meets all of the basic requirements of a feature film.*

But just last week, the original 1973 film came up in a question with my monthly trivia team. Did you know that The Exorcist was the first horror movie to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture? (I sure did, and my team earned points for it. I know, you’re impressed.)

So how exactly did The Exorcist break this barrier knowing that Academy voters have historically written off horror films as lesser creations? The answer is likely a pretty simple one: Friedkin had just made The French Connection two years prior, which won him Best Picture and Best Director at the Oscars among the film’s three other wins and three other nominations.

In other words, he wasn’t a “horror director.” He was a director making a horror movie.

The film world has seen plenty of “horror auteurs” over the last century, from James Whale to John Carpenter to Ari Aster. And they’ve received their flowers in due time, of course, though often not in critical reviews or on the awards circuit. But when an established, revered director makes a horror film? Like when Stanley Kubrick made The Shining or when Francis Ford Coppola made Bram Stoker’s Dracula? That’s when you turn heads in the elite industry circles.

And I can’t think of a more jarring example of an award-winning director taking a brief detour into horror than Richard Attenborough’s Magic.**

Let’s say you don’t know anything about Magic, which is a reasonable assumption for many. And let’s say we happened to be discussing Attenborough’s Gandhi, which won him Best Picture and Best Director at the Oscars in 1983, along with six other wins for the film and three other nominations. If I was to then ask you to guess what Attenborough’s film released just before Gandhi was about, would you wager that it’s a psychological horror film about a ventriloquist’s dummy with a murderous mind of its own? (If you did, I would have a series of follow-up questions as well as a number for you to call.)

Magic isn’t just an odd table-setter for Gandhi. It’s a glaring outlier in Attenborough’s entire filmography. This is a director who made war films, musicals, romances, comedies, biopics, historical dramas—sometimes many of those things all in one film. But Magic is his only detour into the realm of horror. Nothing else even comes close.***

Attenborough went about it exactly the right way, though. Because he treated his horror film as merely another assignment, not a lesser assignment.

He began with a script by the legendary William Goldman, which was adapted from his own novel. And in the late 70s, there wasn’t a better way to start your production than with a Goldman script.**** The prestige only grew from there as rising star Anthony Hopkins, aging icon Burgess Meredith, and the multi-talented Ann-Margaret joined the cast and renowned composer Jerry Goldsmith signed on to do the score. It was the third collaboration between Attenborough and Hopkins, but the first where he was the star of the show.*****

With that in mind, Attenborough delivered not a pulpy, gory bloodbath but a calculated, brooding character study. If you come to Magic to see a slasher flick with a killer dummy, you’ve come to the wrong place.******

We spend almost the entire film with Corky Withers, played by Hopkins, and his smart-mouthed puppet Fats. Corky’s act has become a hit, and his manager (Meredith) has secured him a pilot for a series with a major network. But as fame and fortune impend, Corky and Fats become virtually inseparable—so much that Corky lashes out whenever Fats’ constant presence is brought into question. It’s a pure character study, something that horror films rarely are.

It’s not that most horror auteurs couldn’t pull off a film like Magic. They just have different goals. For his one foray into horror, Attenborough chose a project that would allow him to probe the psychology of a man losing his grip on reality rather than inflate the body count through gratuitous violence, and the film is sturdy in his hands for that reason. Much like a ventriloquist and his dummy, right?

*If I may say so myself, I think my Letterboxd review is pretty good.

**It only took me 272 words to get to today’s film, but my editor John said it “actually worked this time,” whatever that means.

***Attenborough is an accomplished actor as well, of course. He’s remembered most fondly for his role in Jurassic Park. Which is also a horror movie. (And I’ll fight you if you disagree.)

****I’m sure every director in the world wanted to work with Goldman at the time. In fact, Norman Jewison was originally hired to direct this film, and even Steven Spielberg expressed interest.

*****Again, the talent almost attached to this film is wild. Jewison wanted Jack Nicholson to play the lead role! And Spielberg had Robert De Niro in mind! Imagine either of those two men playing a ventriloquist. Tremendous stuff.

******My editor John would like to point out that, if this is indeed what you’re looking for, the right place is Disney+, where you can find a new Goosebumps series. (I’ve been told this film was an influence on Stine’s dummy stories!)

Magic is now streaming on Peacock, Shudder, AMC+, Kanopy, Tubi, and DirecTV, and it is available for rent elsewhere.