Hollywood is a funny place. A director gets excommunicated from the Catholic Church, makes a horror movie about creepy children and even creepier landlords, and then watches as the film gets passed around like a cheap Halloween mask at a flea market. Alice, Sweet Alice (1976) is one of those films that refuses to die, much like its villain, much like the endless debates over whether pineapple belongs on pizza. (It doesn’t.) What should be a straightforward slasher flick about a murderous child in a yellow raincoat becomes a messy sermon on Catholic guilt, bad parenting, and how to make sure your horror movie gets mistaken for a church PSA. It’s ambitious. It’s weird. It’s also kind of a mess.
A Budget So Low, Even the Knife Was Borrowed
If you ever wonder why Alice, Sweet Alice has the aesthetic of a particularly grim student film, it’s because Alfred Sole, the film’s director, was an architect before he was a filmmaker. Yes, an architect. He went from drawing blueprints to drawing blood. Naturally, instead of designing buildings, he decided to take a swing at making a horror movie about Catholic trauma. Probably because he had some himself—after his first film, an adult feature, got him formally excommunicated, Sole went from filming risqué bedroom antics to murdering children on screen. We call that range.
The film was originally titled Communion, a title so misleading that even the most devout horror fans probably thought they were about to watch a religious instructional video. Columbia Pictures considered distributing it, then passed, presumably after realizing that marketing a child-murder horror movie as Communion might not be the PR win they were looking for. Enter Allied Artists, a company that saw Communion, changed the name to Alice, Sweet Alice, and hoped people would show up expecting a different kind of movie. When Brooke Shields got famous, the film was repackaged again as Holy Terror to cash in on her newfound stardom, because what’s a little misleading advertising when you’re already dealing with a plot that makes The Da Vinci Code look straightforward?
The Case of the 19-Year-Old Child
If you’ve ever watched Alice, Sweet Alice and thought, “Wow, that 12-year-old protagonist sure has the presence of an adult woman,” you weren’t wrong. Paula E. Sheppard, who plays the title role, was actually 19 during filming, proving once again that horror films love casting people who have no business playing their actual age. Meanwhile, a young Brooke Shields, all of nine years old, makes her first feature film appearance, and she promptly gets strangled to death within the first ten minutes. A star is born!
The production was about as smooth as sandpaper on sunburned skin. Filming dragged on between 1975 and 1976 due to budget problems, and at one point, actress Linda Miller had a real-life breakdown so severe that she had to be hospitalized. Fun fact: they were already filming in a hospital, so at least that saved on location costs. The movie was shot in Paterson, New Jersey, which adds an extra layer of horror to the proceedings. If you’ve ever been to Paterson, you understand.
As for the plot? Alice, Sweet Alice follows a dysfunctional family where the youngest daughter (Shields) is murdered at her First Communion, and her older sister Alice (Sheppard) is the prime suspect because, well, she’s a little off. But—spoiler—it’s actually a deranged old woman named Mrs. Tredoni, who believes she’s on a divine mission to punish sinners. It’s like Scooby-Doo, if Velma carried a butcher knife and had deep-seated religious trauma.
The Film That Couldn’t Decide If It Wanted to Be Good
Critics were about as divided on Alice, Sweet Alice as Catholics and Protestants at the height of the Reformation. Some praised it for its eerie atmosphere, giallo influences, and moments of genuinely unsettling horror. Others found it to be an incoherent mess that took itself way too seriously. The Los Angeles Times called it “foul,” which is ironic considering this was the same decade that gave us The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Meanwhile, Roger Ebert actually liked it, but that’s the same man who gave Speed 2: Cruise Control a thumbs-up, so interpret that as you will.
What really cemented Alice, Sweet Alice as a cult classic, however, wasn’t its brilliance but its sheer weirdness. Over the years, it has been championed as an “American giallo,” which is a fancy way of saying “it kind of looks like a Dario Argento movie if you squint hard enough.” It has also been analyzed to death by scholars who want to make it sound deeper than it actually is. Yes, it’s a film about Catholic guilt, familial neglect, and the oppressive nature of religious dogma, but let’s be honest—it’s also a film where an obese landlord gets stabbed in the gut after being covered in cockroaches. High art, indeed.
Two Stars for Effort, One Star Deducted for Sanity
Alice, Sweet Alice is one of those movies that horror nerds will argue about until the end of time. It has atmosphere. It has ambition. It has a 19-year-old pretending to be 12. But it also has plot holes big enough to fit a Sunday school class, pacing issues that could put an insomniac to sleep, and a tendency to take itself way too seriously. If you love weird, slow-burn horror films with religious overtones, questionable casting decisions, and at least one scene that will make you wonder, “Who thought this was a good idea?”—then by all means, dive in.
For everyone else? Maybe just go watch Psycho instead.
⭐️⭐️ (2/5)
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