October Horrors #10: Oddity (Damian McCarthy, 2024)

I will frame this review by saying that, over the past year or so, I have watched a number of highly acclaimed / hyped new horror movies, and, sadly, have found that they all either failed to live up to their full potential, or else just left me feeling a bit underwhelmed. On its own modest terms however, this latest word-of-mouth hit really worked for me.

This will likely be a short review, partly I don’t really have any deep thoughts I need to unpack with regard to Irish writer-director Damian McCarthy’s second feature film to date, and partly because it is very much the kind of movie whose structure makes it difficult to get too deep into discussion of plot detail without straying into spoiler territory.

But, I do at least want to record the fact that I watched it, and really liked it, in the hope this recommendation might inspire a loyal reader or two to check it out - possibly even in time for Halloween next week, as this one definitely makes a good fit for the season.

So - our setting is contemporary Ireland, where Ted (Gwilym Lee) and his wife Dani (Carolyn Bracken) are in the process of renovating a remote stone farmhouse. Ted is a doctor who works the night shift at a nearby psychiatric hospital, leaving Dani alone overnight.

Subsequent to a suitably baleful and unnerving opening sequence establishing this situation, it becomes clear that Dani has in fact been murdered, seemingly by patient recently released from Ted’s hospital, who intruded into the house during the night, and who in turn has subsequently been found dead in grotesque and inexplicable circumstances.

Jumping forward exactly one year in the timeline, Dani’s twin sister Darcy (also played by Bracken) re-enters the life of Ted, who is living in the now completed farmhouse with his new girlfriend Yana (Caroline Menton), seemingly determined to obtain some kind of closure and/or clarity vis-a-vis her sister’s death.

It is with the introduction of the Darcy character that the tone of the film shifts from a sharp, cynical brand of 21st century realism incorporating all the usual accoutrements of contemporary horror (smartphones, jump scares, dissociative editing, drone shots, rumbling sound design, softly spoken yet totally self-centred characters), and, admirably, instead begins to embrace what I can only describe as a mammoth dose of dusty, old-fashioned creepitude.

Darcy, you see, is a blind woman with keenly attuned psychic abilities, who runs a fantastical antique shop specialising in the sale of ‘cursed objects’ - each of them precisely calibrated via Darcy’s paranormal abilities to ensure that, whilst legitimate purchasers may sleep easy, shoplifters taking advantage of the sightless proprietor will have a very bad time indeed.

Which, needless to say, does not bode well for the substantial locked trunk which Darcy arranges to be delivered to Ted and Yana’s farmhouse, in advance of her own surprise arrival…

…and, if you think that this sounds like a conceit which an early 20th century ghost story anthologist might have rejected for being a bit too whimsical and on-the-nose, well… suffice to say that it ultimately feels as if the contents of several entire Pan Books of Horror Stories have been put through a blender to create the script for ‘Oddity’. In the best possible way, I hasten to add.

Or, perhaps it is instead more helpful to instead suggest that things play out rather like one of those projects in which all of the episodes in an Amicus-style portmanteau movie have been sewn together into a single story - but done with such care that, in this case, you can barely even see the joins.

Picking the film apart post-viewing, I can identify at least six or seven different horror tropes / story set ups woven together here - I won’t list them all, because, again, spoilers - but somehow, they are all successfully combined into a simple, minimal narrative featuring just six inter-connected characters and two locations.

The result, essentially, in an agreeably pulpy kind of supernatural riff on a ‘Les Diaboliques’-model thriller, which, in defiance of all storytelling logic, all hangs together just beautifully.

The unusual mixture of real world verisimilitude and atmospheric, occult-tinged fantasy is finely balanced here too, with the more outré elements of the story taking on an eerie, surrealistic power which they would likely not have achieved had the whole thing been framed as a Burton-esque retro gothic horror type palaver (which, thank the dark gods, it is not).

The scary bits are properly scary, the whimsical/creepy bits are whimsical and creepy… and I’d even go so far as to say that the funny bits are funny, although they’re a long time coming, admittedly.

And… that’s about all I have to say on the matter really.

A great little movie, well worth making time for, and a great choice for Halloween-adjacent viewing, I reckon.

So, if you find yourself ploughing trough the fallow fields of whatever streaming services you’re signed up to later this week after the trick or treaters have gone to bed - take a chance on ‘Oddity’, and I’ll wager a very small amount of money you won’t regret it.

Hammer House of Horror: Growing Pains (Francis Megahy, 1980)

Fourth episode in the series, and I’ll bang through it quickly, as I think this was the weakest to date.

Gary Bond (the lead from ‘Wake in Fright’ (1971)) is a borderline mad scientist, busy creating artificial food stuffs to ease world hunger and testing them out on super-cute giant rabbits in his home laboratory. His wife (Barbara Kellerman from Norman J. Warren’s ‘Satan's Slave’ (1975)) is some kind of philanthropist raising funds for assorted charities.

Pre-credits, the couple’s young son wanders into his Dad’s lab, eats some random stuff from a jar, freaks out, dies. So, the grieving parents replace him by adopting a weird, affectless kid with a bad attitude from the nearest children’s home.

Their new son either has telekinetic powers, is possessed by the ghost of their dead son, or some combination of the two. (Simple though the plot is, I didn't quite get what was supposed to be going on here.)

The rather mean-spirited message here seems to be that, whilst these rich, do-gooding parents are off solving the world’s ills, they've forgotten to give either of their children the love and attention they need, so thus they must suffer (as if their first son dying wasn't punishment enough).

It’s all a rather glum business, leavened with dead rabbits and poisoned dogs (all fake, of course, but still not exactly my idea of top flight entertainment), which leaves a somewhat unpleasant taste in the mouth.

I fell asleep a bit towards the end, so I think I might have missed the gist of the surprise ending. I should go back and check before posting this really, but… is there really much to be gained?

Probably better just to move on to potentially more rewarding future episodes with exciting names like ‘The Carpathian Eagle’ and ‘The House that Bled to Death’...

FRANCO FILES: Mil Sexos Tiene La Noche(1984)

AKA:
I don’t think this one was ever released in any English-speaking territories, but if (like whoever sub-titled my copy) we go the direct translation route, then it is my duty to inform you that today we’re going to be talking about a film called ‘Night Has 1,000 Sexes’.

And, much has I’d love to leave you to contemplate such titling decisions at your leisure, I’m afraid it’s also my duty to inform you that, thanks to a brief mix up whilst typing the Spanish title into imdb, I discovered that the notorious Spanish slasher movie ‘Pieces’ was first released in 1983 under the name ‘Mil Gritos Tiene la Noche’ (‘Night Has 1,000 Cries’), leading me to suspect that the producers of this entirely unconnected Franco film simply jumped on that name for a quick buck and a bit of a laugh. (And of course, the ‘Pieces’ title itself seems to owe a certain debt to ‘The Awful Dr. Orlof’s original Spanish title of ‘Gritos en la Noche’, so who knows – maybe Franco was just getting his own back in some obscure fashion.)

Context:
As with most of the films Franco made for ‘Golden Films Internacional’ during the ‘80s, it looks as if this one enjoyed a brief release in Spain before disappearing altogether, with none of the international repackaging that most of his earlier films were subject to. Who were those guys, and was it really in their best interests to pay Franco to make so many movies? Did these things actually play in theatres in Spain? Did anyone go to see them? All questions for us to ponder in the dark hours of the night (1,000 sexes notwithstanding).

Content:
A loose reworking of 1970’s already pretty loose ‘Nightmares Come At Night’, this quintessential Franco fable has Lina Romay playing a psychic living in the Costa Del Sol, where she demonstrates her powers in a (surprisingly non-erotic) cabaret act in collaboration with her husband, played by Daniel Katz (I guess Antonio Mayans must have been having a week off).

Of course it’s only a matter of time before she falls under the spell of a sinister witch – Carmen Carrion in the familiar Lorna/Princess Obongo role – who apparently possesses Lina’s body as she sleeps, sending her out as a kind of succubus to kill her enemies. Strained mental health, reality/fantasy confusion, pot smoking, sapphic groping and tormented naked writhing naturally ensues. Happy days.

Kink:
Less explicit than many of Franco’s ‘80s films, ‘Mil Sexos..’ makes up for it by virtue of being far more stylish, hitting a rare peak of visual imagination and formal experimentation that often harks back to his dreamy ‘70s hey-day.

It would be ungallant of me to dwell on the fact that Lina looks a bit tired out in some of the film’s early scenes (and an absolutely appalling pair of baggy pyjamas doesn’t help), so we’ll skip over that and just say that she certainly regains her customary enthusiasm later on. Katz unfortunately is dead weight, and Carrion’s screen-time is minimal, but if there’s one thing Franco knows when he’s on form, it’s how to make something out of nothing, and some of the hazy, beautifully shot erotic dream sequences he pulls off here could probably have functioned with no human component whatsoever. A super slow-paced lesbian tryst at a pot party is also one of the film’s highlights - a great trance-like scene, with an underlying menace that’s distantly reminiscent of something outta ‘Blue Velvet’ or ‘Twin Peaks’, as Daniel White’s droning, echoplexed freak-out music hits hard, throwing animal cries and death-like moans into the mix for an atmosphere of implied psychic violence. 3/5

Creepitude:

“What’s that you’re reading?”

“An old book: it’s called… Necronomicon.”

H.P. Lovecraft’s sanity-compromising tome makes a welcome return to the Franco-verse, although as usual the bits that we hear read aloud from it sound pretty distant from anything you’d expect to find within the scrawl of the Mad Arab. Naturally the book’s inclusion doesn’t really lead up to anything of particular interest, but although the central psychic domination / subconscious witchcraft motif isn’t explored half as powerfully here as it was in some of Franco’s better takes on this over-familiar subject matter (‘Macumba Sexual’ and the astonishing ‘Lorna the Exorcist’ spring to mind), the film’s unusually captivating technique ensures that things rarely drag, with the atmospheric barometer rarely dipping beneath the level of “thoroughly sinister”.

In fact several moments here are pretty damn spooky, with Franco using sudden focus switches and primitive stop motion trickery to create subliminal flashes of phantom figures – an idea which is used very well, in spite of its simplicity and potential corniness – whilst the ‘echo chamber coal mine’ vibes on the soundtrack just won’t let up. 3/5

Pulp Thrills:
Nothing doing. I mean, it’s the ‘80s, and I doubt the budget here even stretched to lunch money. 1/5

Altered States:
Definitely one of the best latter day expressions of Franco’s patented brand of oneiric Mediterranean psychedelia, ‘Mil Sexos..’ is extremely well photographed, dripping with casually freaked out visual splendour as Jess goes wild with some surprisingly experimental sequences.

In particular,  he seems obsessed with textures here, plunging us into patterns of dense foliage (of the floral rather than human variety, for once) as the characters explore a ruined, overgrown walled garden, and he really gets way out towards the end of the film, as the camera takes a lengthy psychedelic journey across a blood-splattered window, revelling in the Pollack-esque patterns smeared against the bright sun-light.

There’s also a brilliant scene in which Lina’s voiceover reads aloud from a pulp horror novel that was presumably lying around whilst they were filming, as the camera cuts between an extreme close-up of her lips and shots of the book’s lurid artwork, depicting a bloody knife clutched between another pair of lips.

All of these stand as great examples of the kind of accidental, improvisatory quasi-genius that Franco scatters through his better films – real otherly inspired bits of filmmaking that make his (admittedly understandable) reputation as a talentless exploito hack seem doubly unfair. 4/5

Sight-seeing:
Shot in Malaga and Gran Canaria (thanks, imdb), ‘Mil Sexos..’ isn’t particularly big on outdoor locations, but it makes excellent use of Andalucía’s Moorish architecture, including an absolutely jaw-dropping tiled courtyard, assorted decorative wrought iron carvings and that aforementioned crumbling walled garden, whilst Franco frames some particularly fine shots around a corridor lined with some distinctive pastel-shaded stained glass windows, in the same ancient-looking building (some kinda lounge / hotel bar?) in which Lina & her husband perform their psychic act. As you might expect, waves crash hypnotically on the soundtrack, gulls call, and, despite the prevalence of interiors, sense of place is strong. 4/5

Conclusion:
Along with the similarly themed ‘Macumba Sexual’, this is definitely one of the best ‘80s Francos I’ve seen thus far. Although clearly derivative of any number of his previous films, solid technique, pungent atmosphere and captivating visuals make it a good effort all round, and a GREAT one for its era.

VHS Purgatory:Exorcist II: The Heretic(John Boorman, 1977)

In collaboration with a selection of the finest film blogs the infranet has to offer Breakfast In the Ruins is proud to contribute this quality post to Blair Week, a six day extravaganza expounding on the virtues of Linda Blair and her legacy of quality motion pictures. Don't believe me? Just read on...


How weirdly appropriate it is that as the New Labour era in the UK finally grinds to a sad and desultory halt, I should be invited to help celebrate BLAIR WEEK. In fact, I’m sure this grand ironic gesture is exactly what my primarily American horror-blogging colleagues had in mind all along, the wry devils! Um… well anyway, thanks to Seth of the excellent Lost Video Archive for inviting me to take part, and let’s get down to business 1977 style.

Now tell me where to stick it if you want, but I’ve never really been much of a fan of ‘The Exorcist’. Not that I think it’s a terrible film by any means – in the context of William Friedkin’s confounding filmography of troubled and troubling movies, it’s pretty fascinating viewing. But when it comes to the film’s vast success and cultural influence, the inexplicable weight of critical attention and analysis it seems to command… I just don’t get it, man.

In fact, it bugs me to the extent that I get pretty riled whenever I see somebody casually declare The Exorcist “one of the greatest films ever made” or somesuch. I mean, sure, each to their own, but really..? This weird, incongruous mess of grindhouse shock tactics and chest-beating, post-Taxi Driver male angst? This pompous meditation on Catholic guilt that keeps collapsing into some kind of hysterical terror of female sexuality? Were we watching the same movie here? I mean, if people got all hot and bothered about, say, ‘Cruising’ instead, I could kinda dig that (or at least it would be funny), but Citizen Kane> Battleship Potemkin> THE EXORCIST? Gimme a break.

So naturally I loved the idea of ‘Exorcist II: The Heretic’ long before I’d actually seen it. What’s that you say? They made a pointless, nonsense-filled sequel that’s universally hated and reviled by the bores who champion the first film? And they put JOHN freakin’ BOORMAN in charge? Oh man, bring it on!


Actually, whilst writing this it occurs to me that Friedkin and Boorman had quite a lot in common – both obviously talented but deeply eccentric directors who accidentally managed to turn incredibly unlikely subject matter into massive commercial success during the mid-‘70s (‘Deliverance’, in Boorman’s case) and spent the next decade or two furiously proving that lightning rarely strikes twice, much to the delight of fans of weird, flawed, perverse films the world over.

On the surface, Boorman may have appeared a safer guiding hand for transforming a one-off hit into a high profile horror franchise, but if you put all of his movies side by side I don’t think you’ll find one that is even REMOTELY normal. ‘Point Blank’? ‘Deliverance’? ‘Excalibur’? ‘Zardoz’? Oh my god, fucking ZARDOZ… I mean, if you ever needed proof that the guy was off his nut – just try watching ‘Zardoz’. It’s unbelievable. But unlike Friedkin’s career nosedive post-‘Sorcerer’, somehow they kept on giving Boorman money, access to a-list stars, marketing campaigns… and the chance to direct The Exorcist II.


With all this in mind, I guess I must have been one of the few people to ever sit down to watch ‘Exorcist II: The Heretic’ with the expectation that it’s gonna be completely amazing. And… well to be honest, I was *slightly* disappointed. Don’t get me wrong – I mean, it was still pretty damn good as far as weirdo Hollywood horror films go. Certainly a lot more fun than ‘The Exorcist’ ever was, so I can still instigate pub arguments by loudly proclaiming that I like this one better without being dishonest.

The relentless logic of b-movie mathematics makes the point abundantly clear. ‘Exorcist II: The Heretic’ has a drunk looking Richard Burton belting out exorcisms, a grown up Linda Blair suffering a seizure whilst performing a tapdance routine, fuzzed out rockin’ from Ennio Morricone, and a bethroned James Earl Jones playing the demonic king of some kind of weird African locust cult. ‘The Exorcist’ does not. ‘Exorcist II: The Heretic’ wins. That’s just the way it is.


And like all of Boorman’s movies, ‘The Heretic’ is a pretty spectacular visual experience, full of wild editing, unhinged special effects, insect-wing flights across desert landscapes and dream-like collages of overlapping imagery, all serving admirably to distract the viewer’s attention from the general vagueness re: what’s actually going on.

Weirdly, I also think the film’s aesthetic seems notably ahead of its time. You’ll have to bear with me on this one, but prior to looking up the 1977 release date for this review, I’d naturally assumed that ‘The Heretic’ was made sometime in the early/mid ‘80s. The special effects and cinematography, the music, Linda Blair’s Chrome Art Deco penthouse, the mystic, neo-hippie, yuppies-listening-to-Peter-Gabriel approach to African culture – all seem to yell NINETEEN EIGHTY THREE loud and clear…. or maybe it’s just me? Pretty freaky, anyhow. Maybe we can add ‘unintentional prophet of minor cultural trends’ to John Boorman’s already impressive list of achievements, and just thank our lucky stars that Sean Connery running around in PVC pants taking orders from a giant stone head in ‘Zardoz’ didn’t have a similarly prophetic effect.

Anyway, for all this, ‘The Heretic’ wasn’t quite as great a raspberry in the face of conventional film-crit wisdom as I’d hoped. Based on what I’d previously read about the film, I was kinda expecting that Boorman would have ditched the legacy of the first film completely and set the controls for another jaw-dropping excursion into whatever makes him tick. But no – with enough co-producers and script assistants on-board to form their own football league, ‘The Heretic’ is never allowed for one second to escape its position as a SEQUEL.


Apparently, before Boorman and scriptwriter William Goodhart got involved the producers were planning to just string together a bunch of ‘unused footage’ from ‘The Exorcist’ with some thin wraparound narrative and call it a day. And whilst the finished product is obviously far more ambitious and worthwhile than that, references to the events of the first film still predominate, going as far as to integrate reconstructed flashback sequences in a rather desperate “hey, remember why we’re all here” sort of fashion, and in the grand tradition of Hollywood sequel-think, Regan, Pazuzu and the brow-furrowing emissaries of the Holy Catholic Church all return, clumsily reunited for a bigger budget THIS TIME IT’S WAR throwdown.

I can’t claim to know much about this film’s creative gestation beyond what wikipedia tells me, but ‘The Heretic’ gives the impression that Boorman and co essentially set out to make this wicked movie about Richard Burton as a renegade Catholic priest rampaging around Africa investigating witch cults, and somewhere along the way the ghost of ‘The Exorcist’ attacked that film and gutted it, wearing it’s skin like some kind of gnarly, ill-fitting disguise. To switch to another unwieldy metaphor, it’s a cuckoo film, if you know what I mean – full of imagination and talent and great ideas, but the Exorcist stuff takes over the nest and gobbles it all up. So, uh, more like a ‘cuckoo victim’ film I suppose? An unsuspecting-Sparrow-mother film..? Oh, I dunno, forget about it.

Point is, as much as I hate to agree with the outraged “but it makes no sense!” IMDB pundits – I, who eats drug-addled Czechoslovakian new wave movies for breakfast and asks for more! - ‘The Heretic’ is indeed a mess. Thankfully though, it’s a mess so full of great stuff, it makes you wonder who the hell decided ‘order’ was such a good idea in the first place.


First off, there’s the reason I’ve been asked to write about this movie for you and perhaps the reason you’re reading: the unmistakable mutant charm of Linda Blair. Ah, Linda! I’ll freely admit that I haven’t actually even seen many of Linda Blair’s films (an oversight that participation in this week long Blairfest will hopefully encourage me to correct), but as a cultural icon, I’ve always known she’s untouchable.

There’s something completely wonderful about the way that Blair’s participation in both ‘The Exorcist’ and the super-notorious made for TV sleaze-fest ‘Born Innocent’ in ’74 automatically raised her to the level of a top-billing cult/horror starlet, a name whispered in playgrounds around the world, synonymous with defiled innocence, original sin and Satanic, pre- pubescent mayhem of all descriptions…and all before she was old enough to vote.

We often don’t realise, I suppose, the extent to which the ideal of an ‘actress’ is subconsciously thrust upon us by movies both great and small. It’s worth remembering that, even in the lowliest slasher flick, filmmakers and casting directors in this none-more-patriarchal industry are predisposed to seek out the girls who are flawless and beautiful and charismatic and able to act with, at least, a competent, easily digestible proficiency. Which is not to say that Linda Blair lacks any of those virtues of course, but we’re so used to seeing women on-screen who exemplify this slightly stultifying ‘actress ideal’ that when someone like Linda, who’d probably get dropped at the first round of auditions for a leading lady role for just being a bit odd lookin’, a bit stroppy, a bit UN-actresslike, is able to pull rank based on her childhood notoriety and stomp commandingly across our screens…. well it’s just a plain beautiful thing to see, making the grown up Linda (kinda – she was eighteen circa ‘Exorcist II’) a truly distinctive screen presence.

And boy, she really plays a blinder in ‘Exorcist II’, reprising her signature role with sullen, ham-fisted grace, initiating us into the day to day life of a lonely young woman with a mind full us psychic detritus left over from a debilitating demonic possession, trying to grow up and find her place in the world, splitting her time between Louise Fletcher’s high tech paediatric psychiatry unit (or whatever it’s supposed to be) and her absent mother’s Bladerunner-like futurist Manhattan penthouse.


It’s a strange and lonely life indeed, and it’s hard not to feel for young Regan as she feeds her pet doves (DOVES/LOCUSTS – you see the kind of deep symbolism shit they’re going for here) and stares at the cold New York skyline at dawn, before heading off to spend the day forging psychic connections with handicapped children, doing creepy, precognitive surrealist drawings and fending off the enquiries of furtive priests-on-a-mission.

The aforementioned scene in which we see Regan rehearsing her part in a school production of Westside Story is probably the highlight of the whole movie. She’s enjoying herself. Her eyes lock with this moody saxophone-playing boy she fancies, and YES, for a brief moment, Regan sees herself stepping into a normal, healthy life… but NO, just at that vital second as she grins at him, Father Lamont’s demon-hunting farting around on the other side of the world send her reeling into a psychic hell-spasm, and everyone thinks she’s nuts. Camp, crazy and utterly tragic – total genius from the Blair/Boorman team.

Richard Burton is pretty memorable too as Father Lamont, a sort of Papal Dirty Harry who defies his Church superiors by takin’ crazy risks, forming a psychic bond with Regan and trace the path of Pazuzu back to Africa in order to… um, track down this guy who is able to resist demonic possession and thus represents the future evolution of mankind…? Or something like that. In a fairer world there’d be a great series of airport novels in it anyway.


Unsure how to play such an odd role, and presumably wondering throughout whether taking part in this movie was a huge mistake, Burton just sorta lunges around breathlessly, gritting his teeth and sweating a lot more than is strictly healthy as he’s regularly called back to Rome to be shaken down for his unconventional methods, emerging all the more obsessive to the extent that he spends most of the film seeming pretty unhinged, despite his ostensible role as the hero and voice of righteousness.

I loved the opening sequence, where we meet him in the middle of performing some wing-and-a-prayer exorcism on some girl in the middle of a terrifying African witchcraft ritual – another totally killer scene.

Speaking of which, it goes without saying that I also loved the whole hallucinogenic James Earl Jones locust-king sequence where he tests Richard Burton’s faith by making him walk across a bed of spikes. Great stuff.

And I loved the fact that Louise Fletcher’s psychiatrist character has some kind of machine that allows doctors to directly enter their patients’ minds, travel into their past and interact with their memories, and instead of being completely stunned, everyone’s just like, “ok, cool, let’s give it a try”.

And I love the f-ing awesome fuzz guitar n’ female choir rocker that Ennio Morricone put together for the trailer, although I don’t recall hearing it in the actual movie.

Basically I want to kiss ‘Exorcist II: The Heretic’ all over, even though it’s essentially quite rubbish.

And if there’s an obvious chauvinistic joke in there to tie this review up nicely…. I’m not gonna make it.

Enjoy the rest of Blair Week!



Our colleagues are bringing fresh Linda related content all week long:

Monday May 10:
Lost Video Archive - Savage Streets
Satan's Hope Chest - Chained Heat and Savage Island
Tuesday:
Camp Movie Camp - Grotesque
The Horror Section - Hell Night.
Wednesday:
Illogical Contraption gets Repossessed
Lines That Makes Things drops original Linda inspired artwork
Breakfast In the Ruins - Exorcist II
Thursday:
B Movies and Beyond - Summer of Fear
Camp Movie Camp - Nightforce
Friday:
The Manchester Morgue - Rollerboogie
Happy Otter - The Chilling
Saturday:
Lost Video Archive - Born Innocent
Unflinching Eye wraps it up with a look at Linda's fall from grace.