ABCs of Horror: “A” Is for Alice, Sweet Alice (1976)

Paste’s ABCs of Horror is a 26-day project that highlights some of our favorite horror films from each letter of the alphabet. The only criteria: The films chosen can’t have been used in our previous Century of Terror, a 100-day project to choose the best horror film of every year from 1920-2019, nor previous ABCs of Horror entries. With many heavy hitters out of the way, which movies will we choose?
The four years between 1974’s Black Christmas and 1978’s Halloween are an interesting, unorthodox time period for horror films, especially in the nascent slasher genre. All of the pieces are on the table by this point, and the first “true” slasher film has already arrived—our in-depth examination and definition of the genre pinpoints it as 1973 Italian slasher Torso—but the tropes of that genre haven’t yet become so widely recognized and ubiquitous that they’re inescapable, as they are after Halloween and Friday the 13th. This is an era of more oddball, hard to categorize horror features in the slasher arcana, often tinged with grungy ‘70s exploitation vibes, whether you’re talking about 1976’s The Town That Dreaded Sundown or today’s film: Alice, Sweet Alice.
This is anything but a conventional slasher movie. Indeed, it is marked by its distinct attachment to certain, specific iconography, most notably that of the Catholic church. The film’s original title, Communion, is its most apt one—this is a story where the foreign nature of Catholic dogma to white, Protestant America is given an alien sense of menace. It’s not the the film is taking aim at the church itself, per se, but more the tradition and repression it inherently represents. It’s a story of old values and morals, clashing with what the zealots would see as modern “degradation” of those values. But it’s also suffused with a powerful sense of human misery; a misanthropy that might put you in the mind of something like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Suffice to say, Alice, Sweet Alice is not a cheerful film, but it is an effective one.
The title character is Alice (Paula Sheppard), a 12-year-old girl who faces the world with a particularly churlish, bitter attitude, but with good reason. Born out of wedlock to a now-divorced mother, she has been systematically denied love and empathy throughout her young life, forced to watch that affection consistently applied to her younger sister Karen (played by a young Brooke Shields in her first role), who had the good fortune to be born at the correct time. When Karen is brutally murdered during her first Communion service, however, Alice falls under suspicion, which only deepens as a series of stabbings is conducted by a mysterious, feminine figure in a mask and yellow rain slicker. Visually, that slicker clearly evokes the killer in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, although it’s also practically identical to the quasi-slasher TV movie Home For the Holidays from 1972.