4K UHD Blu-ray Review: Richard Loncraine’s The Haunting of Julia Joins the Shout! Factory

Richard Loncraine’s The Haunting of Julia is something of a film maudit. Adapted from Peter Straub’s first horror novel, the film was shot around London in late 1976 under the title Full Circle (as its title card still reads), then made the festival rounds throughout 1977, before barely being released in England in 1978. It belatedly turned up in the U.S. three years later, boasting the more genre-friendly title The Haunting of Julia but still failed to find much of an audience. A lot of this has to do with some significant stylistic differences between Loncraine’s film and the wave of slasher movies that dominated the horror market at the time: Above all, its unhurried pace and relatively restrained depiction of violence stand in stark contrast to the slasher’s relentless plotting and unfettered brutality.

From its disturbing opening scene to its unforgettable final shot, The Haunting of Julia is suffused with an aura of melancholy. The opening credits play over a slow pan across the façade of an ornate Victorian home, the shot lingering just a moment on a young girl standing at a top floor window, holding a toy that we can barely hear clanging its cymbals. This image, however briefly glimpsed, is central to the story, returning again (in chillingly altered fashion) at the film’s conclusion, thus demonstrating why it should properly be titled Full Circle.

The Haunting of Julia, adapted for the screen by Harry Bromley Davenport, then moves on to a quiet breakfast that descends suddenly into tragedy when Kate (Sophie Ward), the daughter of Julia (Mia Farrow) and Magnus Lofting (Keir Dullea), starts choking on a piece of apple. Julia, a trained nurse, tries unsuccessfully to perform an impromptu tracheotomy on Kate, leaving her to bleed out on the kitchen floor. The trauma of her daughter’s death sends Julia to recuperate at a clinic, and, upon resuming her life, she decides on two momentous changes: leaving Magnus’s controlling care and buying a new house in another part of London.

As it turns out, Julia’s new abode comes with its own history of horrors, and The Haunting of Julia soon shifts into slow-burn mystery mode, with Julia seeking to explain recurring visions of a blond girl who looks an awful lot like Kate. The truth, though, is far more insidious, hearkening back more than 30 years to a homicidal kiddie cult led by a diabolically precocious, angelically radiant girl called Olivia Rudge (Samantha Gates). The group’s idea of child’s play comprised random acts of cruelty including animal sacrifice, sexual manipulation, and genital mutilation, all fueled by a rampant anti-German xenophobia.

The story’s basic setup—a bereaved parent spontaneously opts to make a serious life change in order to forget the death of their child—means that The Haunting of Julia both points back to Nicolas Roeg’s chilling Venice-set Don’t Look Now as well as paves the way for Peter Medak’s terrifically effective haunted house movie The Changeling, starring George C. Scott. When people around Julia start dying in mysterious accidents, the film comes to resemble Richard Donner’s The Omen, albeit with far less gore (and absolutely no nod to Satan). Like Donner’s film, The Haunting of Julia is concerned with the nature and influence of evil but fails to adduce any purely metaphysical point of origin. Instead, the film seems to suggest that, per Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the fault lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.

Image/Sound

Shout! Factory offers the film on 4K UHD and standard Blu-ray discs. Both transfers look quite sharp and clean. The expanded dynamic range of the former allows for increased depth and clarity of the images, especially in dimly lit scenes, of which there are quite a few in the film. The muted palette of browns and yellows comes across strongly. Flesh tones look ruddily lifelike. Grain levels are thoroughly well-resolved. Audio comes in a sturdy two-channel Master Audio mix that clearly delineates the dialogue, and ably supports Colin Towns’s eerie, brooding score.

Extras

The commentary by director Richard Loncraine and film historian Simon Fitzjohn is a lively listen. Amusingly self-deprecating, Loncraine discusses, among other things, The Haunting of Julia’s rushed production, differences with producers over the amount and kind of horror that the film would contain, and changes that were made in the wake of a screening in the Cannes Film Market. Loncraine is forthright about his mixed feelings about the film, and Fitzjohn is there to balance his opinion, as well as to provide prompts and further information. (A self-described Full Circle “anorak,” Fitzjohn turns up again for an interesting on-camera tour of shooting locations around London, focusing particularly on the Holland Park neighborhood.)

In the first of two interviews included in this two-disc set, actor Tom Conti discusses working with Loncraine on the glam rock cult item Slade in Flame prior to their collaboration on The Haunting of Julia and finding it agreeable to shoot a love scene with Mia Farrow that was subsequently cut from the film. And in the second, actress Samantha Gates talks about her early days as a child model and actor, her vivid visual memories from the set of The Haunting of Julia, her later interest in horror and genre cinema, and showing the film to her own daughters.

Rounding out the extras are an intro to the film by Loncraine and a retrospective by critic and author Kim Newman, who situates The Haunting of Julia within various horror trends prevalent in the 1970s, and discusses at length Peter Straub’s source novel, the changes that were made in the adaptation process, and Farrow’s career (especially her work in genre films).

Overall

This 4K UHD release of the melancholy and eerily ambiguous The Haunting of Julia marks this criminally underrated film’s first appearance on U.S. home video since the VHS era.