Eyes Of Fire’s American Nightmare

With a score consisting mostly of weird sound effects, a cast made up of unknowns, and a plot that did not follow the normal rules of horror suspense, writer-director Avery Crounse’s debut film Eyes of Fire would today probably be destined for either a limited theatrical run or straight-to-streaming release. But in 1983 a film like this could still be marketed as a semi-wide release. And so, before Eyes of Fire almost became a forgotten piece of occult Vestron Video ephemera, some of the Southern U.S. populace got their minds fried in a theater by what has since become recognized as a cornerstone in the nature-is-out-to-kill-us genre.

The plot of Eyes of Fire is not designed for mainstream sensibilities. Director Avery Crounse focuses on setting, landscape, and creative camera work, drawing on his background as a still photographer to shoot real-life Ozark Mountain trees in their roles as “autumnal forest.” The supporting cast includes twigs, branches, wind, heads buried in dirt, fairytale demon witches who sink into the earth, and a group of mud-covered hippie forest spirits who at one point show up naked in a field drinking milk straight from the udder of a cow, a dietary stunt probably too extreme even for the hippies at Woodstock in 1969. 

The other people in the film aren’t from 1969, they’re from the 18th century. It’s the time of the French and Indian War and two girls have been found in the wild by French soldiers who interrogate them. “What happened?” is the question. “Magic happened,” is the reply. In flashback, the girls are revealed to have come from a village where a Christian minister called Smythe (stiffly played by Dennis Lipscomb) is on the way to consolidating power in his very own polygamous cult. He’s full of sketchy promises about finding “the promised land,” and at least seven to ten people believe him. Smythe, who’s taken the girls’ mother, Eloise, as one of his sister wives, is a classic charlatan whose illusion of power is largely based around the abilities of a young psychic and telekinetic woman named Leah (Karlene Crockett). Smythe claims to have rescued and adopted Leah after her mother, a witch, was burned at the stake—so Leah thinks she owes Smythe a debt and uses her powers to act as his guardian angel. Smythe, posing as devout minister, is more than willing to overlook the supernatural witchiness of Leah's behavior as long as her abilities further his own ambition.

Turns out, Puritans aren’t into polyamorous sex cults. Smythe is deemed a heretic and after an escape from being hanged (thanks to Leah) he and his followers flee on a raft to what will be the complete safety of the wilderness. Almost immediately people are getting killed by Shawnee. A tracker named Dalton (Eloise’s actual husband) shows up and straightens things out with the Shawnee, as Leah finds a tree covered in white feathers. This is clearly a sign that the valley below is a place cursed by the spilling of innocent blood—but the cult finds some cabins abandoned by French settlers and decides that this is the promised land, a place where they will be delivered from “the savage influence.” Dalton and Leah are not so sure. 

These suspicions prove correct as naked mud hippie ghosts begin to stalk everyone. Then a mysterious child appears at the edge of the woods wrapped in furs, with eyes that glow like “animals around a campfire at night.” Pretty soon the settlers’ own children are getting possessed or going missing. A humanoid creature-head is dug up in the garden and Dalton finds a broken tablet in a creek engraved with unfriendly words about heads “covered with blood.” It never enters their 18th-century brains that they are being given signs from rocks, rivers and trees. Especially trees. Leah speaks of a secret “in the trees” and has already found what could be called the Witch Tree.

There are real-life documented cases of people attempting to talk to rocks, twigs, and leaves. It is rare when these objects actually respond. But Leah speaks their language and finds what they say to be much more interesting than human conversation. She sleeps outdoors, enjoys eating mud, and has visions of the demon child as grown-up in a dark hooded robe with the same glowing yellow eyes and a face like a gnarled burnt tree. This character, who turns out to be the witch living in the Witch Tree, bears more than a passing resemblance to the dumpster ghoul who shows up roughly 17 years later in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. (The similarity is 100% coincidence, but it’s fun to consider the existence of an alternate film dimension where Mulholland Drive exists as a spiritual sequel to Eyes of Fire—a sequel where the encroachment of Westward expansion and ensuing destruction of nature has led to the witch being evicted from her ancient tree home. She is pushed ever westward until, finally, she finds herself on a Greyhound bus headed for Los Angeles. The sky-high rent and lack of work for tree witches leads to her taking up residence behind that dumpster at Winkie’s. Her leaves and branches are replaced by a shopping cart filled with the ephemera of 21st century consumerism, her magic glowing box of spells now just containing the charred remnants of the broken promise of Manifest Destiny. But still, somehow, she has become more terrifying than ever.  

Anyway, Leah gets accused of acting “stranger and stranger.” She has become like Alice in the Wonderland of old America or like Dorothy unmasking The Wizard (it is notable that the faces of The Witch Tree could be distant cousins to the grumpy apple trees of Oz.) As the settlers’ problems continue to compound, Smythe whines to Leah: “What’s gotten into you? You used to be God’s angel.” But what he is really wondering is why her mystical radio is now tuned away from his channel and, instead, towards the woods. She has, in his mind, fallen from grace; become an outcast angel. 

But the disintegration of the group's sanity has less to do with Leah and more with the idea of collective imagination. If people are living in a haunted forest then it follows that the ghosts would bear resemblance to the same folktales that they have heard and less to do with real spiritual phenomena. Eyes Of Fire is also partially rooted in the idea of the settlers’ experience as a misunderstanding of a specific type of Native American spirituality rooted in animism, a system where each part of the natural world holds its own special power, or medicine. The film’s most potent soliloquy comes when Dalton, sitting by a fire, muses on what the Witch Tree might represent. He recognizes it as emblematic of the Shawnee’s animism-based beliefs but also as connected to Celtic pagan understandings of banshees and forest spirits. In all instances it is a place where the blood of innocent victims gathers.

This dialogue connects beliefs across religious and geographic spectrums and opens up interpretation to include the film’s instances of broken tablets, mysterious children, cast down angels, and hallucinations of flying: all of which have their symbolic antecedents in Far Eastern, Biblical, and European folklore. The witch herself could have been pulled from the pages of a Grimm’s Fairy Tale. Late in the film a psychedelicized sequence arrives where Dalton and Leah face off with the witch at the tree where she holds spirits captive. This is pretty much Crounse in his element as director: practical effects, light/dark color contrast, and backward masked sound editing. But the scene serves a further mystical purpose. At one point in this battle of wills a frog is removed from the witch’s mouth and swallowed by Leah. Throughout history frogs are alternately representative of both witches’ familiars and symbols of rebirth and transformation. And so, through her ingestion of the amphibious creature, Leah herself is transformed and is now ready to assume her role as the Queen of The Forest mentioned by the lost girls at the beginning of the story.

Her dominion will be a land cursed in more ways than one. Most European/American settlers were unable to contend with a belief system based on an interconnection of land, spirit, and human. Crounse gives several ways to interpret the loss of that interconnection. The synthesis of motifs in the story of Leah, as nature spirit, defeating the witch and overcoming the ignorance of a patriarchal antagonist serves almost as an alternate mythology, a dream of the way things could have gone in America. By now we know it hasn’t turned out that way.