Our series of shows on the films of Stuart Gordon returns with his first effort for television. DAUGHTER OF DARKNESS (1990) features Mia Sara as a young lady on a trip to Romania in search of her family history. When she meets Anthony Perkins as a glass blower who might know something about her absent father things get interesting. Soon she starts to have odd encounters with the locals who seem curious about her background with questions pointing to dark deeds in the past – the distant past! Her lifelong nightmares begin to intensify, blending flashes of details from her visits to historic buildings around Bucharest. Could those lurking creatures she keeps spotting on the streets be supernatural in nature? Is Perkins actually her father? Well, yeah. That one is pretty obvious. But the film unspools its secrets effectively and it qualifies as an underseen little gem.
Troy Guinn joins John Hudson and I to dig into this nearly forgotten movie. We discuss the location shooting and the well-structured narrative. The surprise revelation about the lineage of a sweet taxi driver character is praised with nods toward the classic Van Helsing styled characters in horror fiction. We mourn the decline of Mia Sara’s career and acknowledge that this film marks one of the last horror movies from the great Anthony Perkins. There is some parsing of the one bit of nudity seen in the prints that are available and doubt that fleeting shot was broadcast on CBS in 1990. And we finish up hoping that some enterprising Blu-Ray company will see the wisdom of getting the rights to this and lavish it with special edition love. Fingers and bizarre tongues crossed!
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